JimCarroll

I’ve been covering the link between future trends and innovation strategies for 30+ years. I went back through my blog posts, stretching to 2002, to dig out the nuggets of innovation insight I’ve discovered along the way. This series revisits those stories, tests what still holds up, and turns them into practical lessons for what comes next.

I’ve come back to this idea repeatedly in my work because the mindset behind innovation usually changes before the results do. What people notice, question, challenge, and act on determines how ready they are for what comes next.

“Aggressive indecision” is what happens when an organization knows it must move, yet repeatedly finds reasons not to.

I’ve used this phrase for decades because it captures a uniquely destructive behaviour. Organizations see the trend. They discuss the trend. They hold workshops about the trend. Then they postpone the decision.

The problem is that indecision is not neutral. In a fast market, delay is a decision in favour of the status quo. During periods of disruption, this becomes especially dangerous because leaders often convince themselves that uncertainty will soon disappear. It rarely does. The future does not wait for your confidence to catch up.

The antidote is not reckless action. It is building a culture that can make reasonable decisions with incomplete information and revise them quickly when new evidence appears.

So what does that mean in practice? It means challenging the assumption, habit, or hesitation that is keeping you anchored to the present. Here are three places to start.

Action Items:

• List three decisions your organization has delayed for more than six months.
• Put a cost on each month of continued delay.
• Replace “wait for certainty” with a decision date and a review date.

Explore the full How Innovation Happens series.

Real-World Examples

These researched examples show the lesson at work in the real world.

Mattel Canada: The toy outlet everyone supported and nobody opened

Mattel Canada’s employees spotted a practical problem. Popular toys had short, hit-driven selling cycles, and leftover stock created warehouse congestion and costly discounts. A team proposed opening a toy outlet beside the distribution warehouse near a large Canadian city. Several managers liked the idea.

Yet nothing happened. The problem was not an inability to calculate the business case; it was a conflict between sales and distribution that no one was willing to put on the table. In Harvard Business School researchers’ account, the project remained stalled until managers held direct, fact-based conversations about the competing interests.

Sales recognized that an outlet could protect margins by reducing indiscriminate discounting. Distribution saw reduced inventory movement, and finance could release tied-up working capital. The outlet was eventually implemented. The researchers connected that candour to a broader turnaround in the Canadian division’s performance.

The story is powerful because there was no futuristic invention, no technology moonshot, and no scarcity of apparently supportive executives. There was simply a useful decision that could not get made while everyone protected a departmental position. Innovation was being defeated by the ability to agree in principle while doing nothing in practice.

Why it matters: A company can kill an excellent idea without rejecting it. Endless polite agreement is often the most effective form of indecision.

Sources:

Maersk after NotPetya: When normal approvals became impossible

On June 27, 2017, the destructive NotPetya malware attack brought large parts of shipping company Maersk’s digital operation to a halt. Ports struggled to identify cargo, booking systems failed, and the organization’s ordinary systems of control were suddenly unavailable.

The response forced decisions at a speed no standard digital transformation project would tolerate. Investigative reporting by WIRED documented improvised booking arrangements using email, spreadsheets and WhatsApp; staff also mounted an enormous effort to rebuild the company’s infrastructure.

One crucial directory-service backup survived in Ghana and had to be physically carried through a relay of flights so engineers could begin restoring the network. Maersk’s chairman subsequently said the company had rebuilt roughly 4,000 servers and 45,000 personal computers in ten days, while reporting made clear that full recovery of every application took longer.

This is not an argument for discarding security or bypassing controls in routine operations. It is a warning about what happens when a company can only move decisively after an emergency has removed its ability to deliberate. Maersk’s teams demonstrated extraordinary adaptability under pressure, but the disaster also exposed earlier security-modernization concerns that had not been resolved.

Why it matters: Ask which critical decisions your organization is postponing until a crisis makes the cost of waiting impossible to ignore.

Sources: