The moment usually looks impressive.
A competitor ships a new feature. Within thirty minutes your Slack sounds like a fire alarm. Product managers paste screenshots into five different channels. Engineers pull apart the changelog. Sales shares nervous messages from customers. Someone tags the leadership team with a polite version of "we need to respond to this now."
By the end of the day, everyone in the company is aware of the threat. The observation has been made. Data has been gathered. Context has been shared. The entire organisation has seen the problem.
Three weeks later, nothing has changed.
The observation-action gap
This is the modern version of the strategy-execution gap, and it is more dangerous than the old one. In the old days, companies failed because they did not see changes coming. They lacked data, lacked visibility, lacked the analytical capability to understand what was happening in their market.
That problem has been solved. Most organisations now have more visibility than they know what to do with. They have dashboards showing real-time revenue, customer behaviour, competitive intelligence, operational metrics. They can see everything.
What they cannot do is move.
The gap between observation and action has become the primary constraint on organisational performance. Not the ability to detect a problem. The ability to turn that detection into altered behaviour across the organisation within a meaningful timeframe.
A large technology company recently described their frustration in stark terms. "We see everything. We have forty-seven dashboards and a data team of twenty people. We know exactly when something goes wrong. What we cannot do is get three hundred people to change what they are doing in response. By the time we have agreed on the response, planned the work, allocated the resources, and communicated the change, the window has closed."
Why seeing is not doing
There are three structural reasons why visibility does not automatically produce action.
First, observation creates the illusion of progress. When everyone can see a problem, it feels like something is being done about it. The dashboards are green or red. The data is shared. People are talking about it. But talking about a problem and solving a problem are fundamentally different activities. Many organisations have developed an unconscious habit of substituting observation for action. They believe that seeing a thing clearly is the same as responding to it.
Second, the path from observation to action is undefined. In most organisations, the route from "we noticed something" to "people are doing something different" is not a structured pathway. It is an informal process that depends on who noticed, who they told, whether the right people were in the right meeting, and whether anyone had the authority and capacity to redirect work. This informality is the enemy of speed. Every undefined step is a potential bottleneck.
Third, acting requires coordination that observing does not. Seeing a problem is an individual activity. Responding to it is an organisational one. When a competitor ships a feature, one person can observe it. But changing your response requires the product team to reprioritise, the engineering team to adjust their roadmap, sales to update their talking points, marketing to modify their positioning. Each of these changes affects other work, other timelines, other commitments. The coordination cost of action is orders of magnitude higher than the cost of observation.
The decision traffic jam
Even when organisations do decide to act, the action gets stuck in what you might call a decision traffic jam.
The observation was clear. A decision was made. But between the decision and the action, there are fifty smaller decisions that nobody planned for. Which team absorbs the work? What gets deprioritised to make room? Who approves the change to the roadmap? Does this need a budget reallocation? What about the commitments we already made to customers?
Each of these micro-decisions requires a different person, a different meeting, a different approval. They are not difficult decisions individually. But collectively, they create a queue that stretches for weeks.
The original observation was made in thirty minutes. The strategic decision was made in two days. The execution of that decision takes six to eight weeks because of the decision traffic jam.
By the time the organisation has navigated the traffic jam, the situation has changed. The competitor has iterated. The market has moved. The customers have adjusted their expectations. The response arrives late, if it arrives at all.
Speed as a structural property
The organisations that move fast have not found a way to eliminate the observation-action gap entirely. What they have done is treat speed as a structural property rather than a cultural aspiration.
They build systems that define the path from observation to action. When a strategic change is needed, there is a clear mechanism for propagating that change through the organisation. It is not a set of meetings to be scheduled. It is an infrastructure that routes changes to the right people with the right context.
They keep the coordination cost low by maintaining explicit connections between work streams. When one team needs to change direction, the system shows which other teams are affected and what trade-offs are involved. This removes the informal discovery process that adds weeks to every response.
They invest in what you might call "decision bandwidth." Not the ability to make any single decision faster, but the ability to process many small decisions in parallel without creating a queue.
From observation to velocity
The uncomfortable truth is that most organisations are over-invested in observation and under-invested in action infrastructure. They have world-class dashboards and nineteenth-century execution systems.
The next competitive advantage does not belong to whoever sees things first. It belongs to whoever can turn seeing into doing the fastest. Not once, as a heroic effort. Every time, as a routine organisational capability.
Your dashboards are not the constraint. Your wiring is.
