On Second Thought
The Distance Problem
The higher you rise, the better you get at solving problems — and the later they reach you.
Key Takeaways
Most leaders I work with have gotten better at solving problems every year of their careers.
And worse at seeing them coming.
They resolve problems faster, across a wider range of situations, under more pressure. Every piece of evidence available to them says their judgment has sharpened. And it has.
But what the evidence cannot show them is the gap between the moment a problem became knowable and the moment it became visible to them. That gap appears in no performance review. It shows up later, in the size of the thing by the time they finally see it.
Most leaders assume that gap exists because information has farther to travel.
That’s only half the story.
Early in a career, you’re close to the work, and that closeness is a kind of instrument.
Then responsibility grows. And distance grows with it.
Not one kind. Two.
The first is the distance between you and the work. The second is the distance between you and your own perception.
Promotion quietly widens both.
The Outer Distance
Three things happen to a concern as it climbs.
It arrives late. Every layer adds a pause — a meeting to confirm it, a summary to write, a judgment about whether it’s worth passing on. By the time a small thing has been vetted enough to reach you, it often isn’t small anymore.
It arrives smooth. Every hand-off sands off a rough edge. The tentative this might be nothing… quality of an early observation is exactly the part that doesn’t travel. What reaches you sounds handled — even when it isn’t.
The faintest signals never arrive at all. Only concerns already recognizable as “real problems” tend to make the climb. The quiet signals die at the bottom of the organization — the exact altitude where you most needed to hear them.
The Cost of the Climb
Problems rarely damage organizations because they exist. They damage them because they surface too late to be solved cheaply.
The Inner Distance
Suppose a signal survives the climb. It still has to survive your reaction to it.
In Awareness Is Not the Work, I wrote that the body registers a trigger before the mind does — and that leadership capacity lives in the pause between stimulus and reaction. Detection follows the same principle. Only the signal is quieter. Not the flare of reactivity. The faint sense that something isn’t quite right.
And so we often do to the signal exactly what the organization did before it reached us.
We resolve it too quickly. Experience becomes both an asset and a liability. We’ve seen a thousand situations before, so this one is sorted into a familiar category before we’ve really examined it. Filed as known, it stops being investigated.
We smooth it over. Holding uncertainty open is uncomfortable. Closing it provides immediate psychological relief. Unfortunately, it also disposes of the very signals that most needed to stay alive.
Sometimes we never feel it at all. The earliest signal is often pre-verbal. A flicker. A hesitation. A quiet sense that something deserves another look. It needs only a brief moment of open attention to become conscious. At leadership speed, that moment never comes. The flicker appears… and disappears.
Outside us, the faintest signals are never sent. Inside us, they are never felt. Both failures happen silently.
What We Quietly Reward
Somewhere along the way, notice it early was replaced by handle it well.
It’s an understandable trade. Handling problems well is visible. It’s praised in meetings. Remembered in reviews. It reinforces the identity every capable leader wants to have.
Noticing early leaves almost no evidence behind. A problem caught while still small looks, afterward, like a problem that never existed. So we celebrate the visible half of leadership. And quietly neglect the invisible half.
You can flatten reporting layers, shorten communication pathways, and hold more skip-level conversations. All of that helps. But every structural improvement ultimately delivers information to one final receiver: you. Earlier detection depends on the sensitivity of that instrument.
The Half We Neglect
Faster problem solving is something you do. Earlier problem detection is something you become available for.
Small problems stay small only when someone notices them before certainty arrives.
A Practical Framework
Think about the last three problems that reached you later than they should have. Run each through two questions.
The Diagnostic · Locating Your Distance
Measure the Lag
How long had the problem been knowable before it became visible to you? Not how long it existed — how long someone could have told you. That number is your distance.
Locate the Stall
Where did the signal die? If someone spoke but it didn’t register, your distance is inner. If nobody ever felt safe enough to say anything, your distance is outer.
Across three problems, one pattern usually repeats. That's your diagnosis. Once you know where signals are disappearing, the work becomes much simpler. Each pattern has a corresponding practice. Start with the one that keeps showing up for you.
Six Ways to Notice Earlier
Building Against the Distance
Against Late ArrivalGo to the signal, not just the summary
Most of what reaches you has already been summarized and interpreted by someone deciding what you need to know. So build one channel that hasn’t been.
A monthly skip-level with no agenda. Fifteen minutes in a frontline channel before anyone packages it. One customer conversation you refuse to delegate. Protect it the way you protect a board meeting — the first quarter it gets rescheduled is the quarter it quietly stops existing.
The goal isn't to bypass the organization. It's to keep your sense of normal from drifting away from the ground.
Distance is what happens by default. Contact only happens on purpose.
Against Smoothed ArrivalRequire uncertainty, not just conclusions
Attach two standing requirements to consequential recommendations: How confident are you? and What would change your mind?
Expect some resistance. Senior people are often rewarded for sounding certain, which is precisely why this practice has to become structural rather than optional.
Organizations produce better judgment when they make room for well-reasoned uncertainty.
Against Signals That Never ClimbLower the bar for what’s worth sharing
Sociologist Diane Vaughan, studying the Challenger disaster, called this the normalization of deviance: small anomalies go unraised, then unraised again, until they simply become “how things are.”
Counter it with one standing question: What’s the smallest thing nagging at you that you haven’t said out loud? Then acknowledge the act of noticing — not just being right.
If people are rewarded only when an escalation proves correct, you’ve built a system that escalates nothing until it’s late.
Against Premature ResolutionHold the verdict for one breath
Experience makes pattern recognition fast. The danger isn't seeing patterns. It's that you stop investigating once one appears.
When something lands, notice the impulse to classify. Then introduce one small pause before interpretation — one slower breath, one additional question, or waiting to hear a second perspective before deciding what the situation means. You’re not delaying action. You’re delaying certainty.
The verdict you reach in two seconds is often the one you’ll defend for two quarters.
Against Self-SmoothingDistrust the answer that arrives with relief attached
This one isn’t about speed. It’s about comfort. Holding a problem open, without a plan, is genuinely unpleasant. Closing it feels like competence. Often it’s just relief.
So make the relief itself the cue. When a tidy answer arrives faster than the situation earned, ask: What am I resolving away? You can make this a team habit too — before committing to an important decision: If we look back in six months and discover we missed something obvious, what do we think it was?
The urge to resolve is loudest around the thing that most needs to stay open.
Against the Unfelt FlickerProtect enough quiet to hear what urgency drowns out
The signals that matter most are often the quietest. They compete with calendars, notifications, context switching, and urgency—and urgency usually wins.
Ten minutes of daily stillness. A meeting-free first hour. Three slow breaths between back-to-back high-stakes conversations. None of these create better judgment directly. They create the conditions in which subtle signals can finally register. This is often the first thing cut when the quarter gets hard — and because the effects are invisible at first, the loss rarely feels consequential.
Recovery, reflection, and silence aren't simply restorative practices. They're part of the sensing system leadership depends on.
The instrument that would have detected the problem is often the first thing urgency persuades us to sacrifice.
During your next three meetings, notice one moment: the instant you decide something is already understood.
Ask yourself: What made me become so certain so quickly?
You may discover something uncomfortable. The signal was there. You were the one who stopped hearing it.
Which of the six patterns do you recognize most often in your own leadership?
I'd be interested to hear your thoughts. Email me here.