Below 60%: When Your Company Is Slowing Down
Four behavioural signals that show up 90 days before your P&L does.
A founder recently showed me his numbers, and they looked healthy. Revenue on plan. Pipeline green. Cash runway stable, all good.
Then he said something that did not match the numbers:
“I think we’re slowing down. I can’t just put my finger on exactly what and where to start”
He was right. The warning signs were there, subtle and not obvious. They were not yet showing in the P&L.
Here’s what’s going on:
Performance tells you what happened. The numbers are history. If you want to look into the crystal ball, you must start measuring your business behaviour.
This is the trap many SMEs are walking into.
Most companies measure outcomes, then reverse engineer a story and a conclusion to follow. Typically something like this:
When the quarter is good, the story is execution.
When the quarter is bad, the story is the market or product.
Behaviour sits underneath both stories. Behaviour is the mechanism.
I call it behaviour debt.
When behaviour changes for the worse, you get slower. You do not collapse immediately. And slow compounds.
What you can measure before the numbers move
You stop waiting for the P&L to give you permission to act.
You start measuring the stuff that moves before the numbers move: time, rework, silence, mandate fog, and decision delay.
I use four behavioural indicators because they show up early, they are observable, and they are hard to spin:
Decision latency: Time from “we need a decision” to “we have a decision people can execute.”
Revisit rate
Truth travel time
Mandate clarity
When decision time stretches, everything downstream dilutes. It quickly becomes the norm.
Hiring gets delayed.
Pricing gets delayed.
Product cuts get delayed.
Customer decisions get delayed.
The company starts living in hope.
That is the decision burn rate, the behavioural cousin of cash burn. Revisit rate is the frequency with which the same decision is returned.
A decision that returns twice was never a decision. It was a discussion with a calendar invite.
High revisit rate creates rot. People stay busy. Work expands. Accountability dissolves. Execution becomes optional.
The CEO gets the worst outcome of all.
Motion without progress becomes the norm.
Truth travel time: time from “someone knows” to “leadership knows” to “you know.”
This is a shadow metric.
In healthy companies, bad news moves fast. In distressed ones, it moves slowly. It gets filtered. It arrives packaged. Not because people are evil but because we’re human and often protect ourselves, and the narrative.
A mini office meeting test: Count how often you hear:
Who owns this
Can we do this
Do we have approval
Are we aligned
That language is data. It reveals whether your system is running on permission seeking, not execution.
Permission seeking feels safe, but it also kills speed.
The sentence I hear most often
Behaviour debt is rarely dramatic. It shows up as small frictions that keep repeating:
Decisions that take weeks, then get revisited anyway.
Projects that keep getting one more review
Meetings where everyone agrees and nothing changes
People are waiting for direction, then reworking when direction changes.
Bad news that arrives late, then arrives softened.
Leaders who say “we are aligned” while everyone is quietly hedging.
The sentence I hear most often after the fact is a classic:
“We thought we had more time.”
You almost never do.
I’ve watched this pattern destroy companies for 30 years. The data backs it up: organisations with high decision velocity show materially better growth and profitability. But you don’t need a consultant to tell you what you already feel in your board meetings.
So, behaviour measurement needs one rule: Measure behaviour to see reality.
Use it to remove friction, and not to reward speed.
The test is simple
Think of the last decision your board debated for more than two weeks.
Now ask:
Who actually owns it?
What happens if we wait 30 more days?
Who’s waiting for that decision to move?
If you can’t answer those cleanly, you’re not “gathering data.” You’re accumulating behaviour debt.
It will show up later as performance debt.
Where to start
If you want to start measuring business behaviour this week, start with one metric: Truth travel time.
Ask your team:
What is the worst thing we know right now?
Who knows it?
When did they know it?
When did I know it?
The gap between those two timestamps is your early warning signal.
Then stop talking. The first answer is usually polite. The second answer is usually true.
The fastest way to spot behaviour debt is to measure it.
Start with truth travel time: What’s the worst thing your team knows right now? When did they know it? When did you know it?
The gap between those two timestamps is your early warning signal.
If you want to start measuring this properly, here are my free tools:
Decision Latency Calculator: decisionlatency.earlywarningindex.com
Pre Mortem Generator: premortem.earlywarningindex.com