Delayed Truth

The Quiet Injustice at the Heart of Failure

Some failures are not sudden. They usually have been on a slow burn. Sometimes for years.

I've been involved in a few. Things that were a great idea at the time. We tried, we pivoted as something new happened. We rebuilt. In the end, we couldn't stay ahead. Some of the companies I have worked with had to create and re-create their website several times at great expense before they got it right. As a small business owner, I spent a fortune on my first website, only to have the company I had hired to build it cease operations. It's heartbreaking. The slow burn to the end.

And then - the phoenix rises. It's resurrected. Something becomes available. Something lands. I wrote a few weeks ago about Slack and how it evolved from a communication platform they created to manage a project to eventually becoming the project itself. I could continue with examples - but I trust you get the picture.

Recent research into startup failure keeps turning up the same pattern. It is rarely one bad decision that ends a business. It is a string of quiet signals, arriving months before the collapse, that everyone chooses not to look at directly. Those “Red Flags” that become the topics of many-a-panel discussion during a seminar or festival.

Falling retention. Customers who try the product once and never come back. Sales cycles that keep stretching. Teams that stay busy while revenue stays flat. My favourite? We tested a product in several different colours and asked the target market which one they preferred. “Orange” they said. So we printed extra orange. A lot of extra orange. Guess what? The white sold out. The orange went into storage. Lesson? What people think they want, and what they will buy, are sometimes at odds. Last week's article - When the Brief Isn't the Brief - told this story with a different emphasis.

Often, the signals are there. Nobody acts on them. Not because the evidence is unclear, but because acting on it would mean admitting something uncomfortable. It wasn't going to work without a pivot. Sometimes a pirouette!

I think of this as delayed truth. It isn't really 'caution'. And it often isn't 'perseverance'. It is often an injustice.

Who Pays for the Delay?

When a founder or a leader sits on evidence they already half know is true, they are not just protecting their own comfort. They are making a decision on behalf of everyone downstream of them, without telling those people a decision has been made.

The employee who turns down another job because “we're growing” misses an opportunity. The investor who puts in another round based on numbers everyone in the room knows are softening at best, wrong at worst. The customer who is sold a roadmap the team doubts they can deliver. None of them gets a vote. They are simply not told what the people closest to the truth already suspect. I've been here too. Trusted numbers my gut told me were not accurate. Believed in the dream. And ultimately paid the price. Thankfully, resilience brought me back. Failure became the curriculum. It became the new roadmap.

The injustice is in withholding the truth from the people who have a right to act on it while there is still time to do something about it. That is the injustice. Not the failure itself; failure is not a moral failing.

A good founder and/or leader unfurls the red flag. And gets the team involved in naming the problem and then creating the solution. Early on. A fearful leader imagines that a magic moment will happen and that it will all come good.

Why We Do It Anyway?

Staying busy feels like progress. Staying busy means you don't sit and investigate. You turn the curiosity off. Changing course feels like defeat. So teams keep shipping features, keep taking meetings, keep updating the deck, because motion is easier to justify than a hard conversation. Or sitting and facing the problem that it's approaching like a freight train, but you've turned the speed to slow-motion.

Nobody has to say “this isn't working” out loud if everyone is visibly, frantically occupied. Because busyness is progress, right?

I have watched this happen inside organisations that would never describe themselves as dishonest. They are not lying. They are simply choosing not to look at the data long enough to have to say something true. It only works for so long.

What Justice Actually Asks of Us

I've just finished reading Emma Grede's Start With Yourself. What she has applied to herself from within the corporate level, also works at the corporate level. Face it. Honestly. Call it out for what it is - whatever it is. Justice, in this context, is not a grand gesture. It is much smaller and much harder than that. It is telling your co-founder or your executive team the pilot customers aren't converting before the board meeting, not during it. It is telling your team the pivot (or pirouette) is coming before the runway forces you to. It is telling yourself, first and earliest of all, that the thing you built is not the thing the market wants. Maybe yet. Maybe never. What we fear is that that is the end. Instead of a learning with the potential of a new beginning. We are lost in the fear of the failure instead of being curious about the learning and the stepping stone to something better.

The founders who recover well from failure, the ones who go on to build something that works, are rarely the ones who avoided hard news. Marc Randolph is a perfect example. Six failed companies and still managed to hold onto the belief that a crazy idea that everyone told wouldn't work did.

These founders are the ones who told the truth early enough for it to still be useful. Early honesty gives people time to adjust, to plan, to make their own informed choices about their money, their careers, their trust. An opportunity to be a part of the solution. Late honesty just leaves them wounded. Often fatal.

The Mindset Shift

This is where mindset and justice meet. A growth mindset is not just “learn from your mistakes.” It has to include the willingness to name the mistake while it is still small enough to fix, and to do that in front of the people who are relying on you, not after the fact, in a postmortem nobody asked to read. We know this is good leadership. The research is out. The successful leaders do this. They get their hands dirty. We KNOW this to be true. And yet… Ego and fear dictate that we ignore it all and react rather than take appropriate action.

Are you sitting on a piece of evidence right now that you have not fully said out loud, to your team, your customers, or yourself, that is worth noticing? The truth will not necessarily be catastrophic! Especially if you tackle it openly. We have been calling for authenticity and vulnerability. Now is the time to test that out. Are you courageous enough?

Often it will simply mean a course correction rather than a collapse. In fact, so often! But every day 'it' stays unspoken is a day someone else makes decisions without the information they deserve.

Truth, delivered on time, is not a soft skill. It is justice. It is opportunity.

Celebrating Success One Failure at a Time is now available as a book, an audiobook, and an online course. You can bring this conversation to your organisation as a keynote, workshop, or leadership programme.