A slow-building threat that everyone half knows about becomes a decision someone owns once a manager puts it in front of leadership with its evidence and the cost of waiting.
An example
Everyone in operations at an electric distribution company knew the line crews were getting older. The head of workforce planning for the grid business pulled the numbers anyway: 41 percent of journeyman line workers would be eligible to retire within five years, and an apprentice took four years to reach that grade. Storm restoration times were already slipping in the most rural district. She asked for twenty minutes at the executive operating meeting and brought three things: the retirement curve by district, the apprentice pipeline against it, and the cost of contract crews at storm rates if nothing changed. She ended with a date two years out, after which no amount of hiring could close the gap in time. The chief operating officer asked who owned the problem. Nobody did. By the end of the meeting she did, with a budget request due in thirty days.
Why it works
Everyone already knows about the threat, so the manager brings no news. What changes is that waiting gets a price and a date. Doing nothing, which had looked free, now looks worse and costlier: the costs of inaction are counted, and the point after which they cannot be avoided is named. Acting looks better because the proposal arrives with an owner and a plan. It works because leaders tend to put off foreseeable threats that are slow, diffuse, and expensive to address now. It fails when the evidence is thin or when the warning comes with blame attached for whoever let the threat build.
The thinking behind it
Max H. Bazerman Predictable Surprises: The Disasters You Should Have Seen Coming, and How to Prevent Them (2004), by Bazerman and Watkins, defines a predictable surprise as a disaster that catches leaders off guard although they had the information to foresee it. Cognitive, organizational, and political biases keep such threats off the agenda. Pricing the cost of waiting and naming a date works against those biases, because a diffuse future loss becomes a specific one with a deadline and an owner.
Michael D. Watkins The remedy Watkins and Bazerman propose in Predictable Surprises has three steps: recognize the threat, prioritize it, and mobilize support for preventive action. The tactic follows that order. The manager establishes the threat with records others can check, gets leadership to rank it by attaching a cost and a date, and only then asks for ownership and a budget, briefing the most exposed executive first to start building support.
When it fits
Threats that are visible in data, building slowly, and owned by nobody are the case: an aging workforce, a supplier a large share of revenue depends on, deferred maintenance, a contract that renews badly in three years. You need access to the numbers, a slot at a forum that can assign ownership, and the willingness to own the problem yourself if asked.
How to use it well
Recognize the threat precisely, then make it a priority, then mobilize people around it. The order matters, since a vague alarm wastes the one hearing you are likely to get.
- Quantify the trend from records others can check, and show where it crosses a line that matters.
- Price the cost of waiting, and name the date after which the cheap options close.
- Bring a first step and a budget range, and offer to own it.
- Leave blame out. Say plainly that the threat built up because no one was assigned to it.
Brief the executive whose area is most exposed before the meeting. They should hear the numbers from you first, and they are the likeliest co-owner.
What it costs and where it backfires
Raising the threat makes you its owner, and slow problems are slow to solve: you can spend two years on a fix whose payoff, a crisis that never happens, is invisible. Executives who might have caught it earlier may take the warning as criticism. Repeated alarms from the same person get discounted. The clean form rests on the evidence. Inflating the trend or the cost of waiting to win the hearing turns a true warning into a scare, and the next one will not be believed.
When it is used on you
Take the numbers seriously when a peer names a threat that implicates your area, and check them before you answer. If they hold, ask to co-own the response, which gives you a hand in the remedy. If the cost of waiting has been inflated, show corrected figures and agree on the parts that are true.