Helping leaders motivate their people to a higher level of performance through strong human relations, team building and golachieving. This is the seven Minute Leadership Podcast with your host Paul Fellovledo.
Hello everyone, and welcome to the seven Minute Leadership Podcast. It's episode seven forty four. Today's episode is called tech lag in high speed decisions. I want you to imagine something. You're driving a car using a backup camera that's delayed by three seconds. You turn the wheel, nothing happens. You turn it a little more and still nothing, and then suddenly the image catches up and you realize you're headed towards a parked vehicle. I think everyone would agree that's
a dangerous way to drive. Unfortunately, that's exactly how many leaders run their organizations without even owing it. They're making high speed decisions using delayed information. The technology exists, the dashboards exist, the reports exist, the notifications exist, and now AI exists. The problem is that the information often arrives after the decision window has already passed, and when leaders don't recognize that lag, they create problems that never needed
to exist. Think about sports. A quarterback has about two seconds to decide where the football goes. Imagine if the quarterbacks helmet displayed the defense from five seconds ago. The play is already different. The information is technically correct, it's also completely useless. Many organizations suffer from the same problem. Leaders receive reports about employee morale from six months ago, customer complaints from thirty days ago, finance data from last quarter,
in performance reviews based on events everyone has already forgotten. Meanwhile, the business environment has already changed. The workforce has already changed, the customer has already changed, the threat has already changed. The leader is staring at a historical snapshot while trying to solve a current problem. That's tech lag, and it
shows up everywhere I see it often. In emergency services and ambulances responding to a call, the crew receives information from dispatch, and halfway to the scene, the situation changes, the patient condition changes, the location changes, and additional hazards appear. The information arriving in the vehicle is technically accurate based on what was known five minutes ago. Five minutes can
be an eternity. The crew has to constantly reassess because decisions based on old information can become dangerous and the same thing happens in business and manager sees productivity numbers showing a healthy department and three key employees submitted resignations yesterday. The dashboard hasn't caught up yet. The numbers look great, The reality is a completely different story. Technology creates a
dangerous illusion. It makes us believe we are informed. Being informed and being current are not always the same thing. Some leaders have become addicted to dashboards. They refresh charts all day long. They monitor metrics, they watch trends, they study spreadsheets. Then they walk right past the employee who could tell them exactly what is happening. The dashboard says everything is green. The employees are telling a different story. Which one is more current, which one has less lag?
Many times it is the human being standing right in front of you. This is one reason I often tell leaders to get out of the office. Leadership happens in the field. Leadership happens at the counter. Leadership happens in the hallways. Leadership happens where the work is being done. The closer you get to the work, the less lag exists between reality and your understanding of reality. Now, let's talk about artificial intelligence. AI is becoming one of the
greatest decisions support tools ever created. It can summarize, it can identify patterns, It can help leaders evaluate options. It can process information faster than any human being. I teach leaders to embrace these tools because they are incredibly valuable. The mistake happens when leaders assume the output is real time truth. AI is only as current as the information
it receives. If the data is delayed, in complete, inaccurate, or outdated, the recommendation may also be delayed and complete, inaccurate, and outdated. Technology accelerates processing, it does not automatically eliminate lag. A leader's responsibility is to understand the age of the information they're using. Pilots learn this concept very early. I often talk about aviation because the lessons are so powerful.
A pilot might receive weather information before departure. That information could be perfect, and twenty minutes later it might be completely different. Storms move, visibility changes, winds shift. The pilot who assumes the old report is still accurate creates risk. The pilot who continuously updates their situational awareness stays ahead of the aircraft, and leadership works the same way. Situational awareness is not a one time event. It is a
tenuous process. The best leaders are constantly asking what has changed, what am I missing? How old is this information, what happened after this report was generated? Who is closest to the problem right now? Those questions reduce decision lag, and that brings us to something I call leadership velocity. Leadership velocity is not how fast you make decisions, it's how fast reality reaches. You think about that for a second. Some leaders make decisions quickly, but are working with information
that's two weeks old. Others make decisions at the same speed while using information that is ten minutes old. Those leaders have a massive advantage, not because they're smarter, not because they work harder, because they reduce the distance between reality and decision making. That's where modern leadership is headed. The organizations that win over the next decade will not necessarily have the biggest budgets. They will not necessarily have
the most employees. They will not necessarily have the most technology. They will have the shortest lag between what is happening and what leadership knows is happening. The winning organizations will see reality faster. The winning leaders will see problems sooner. The winning teams will adapt before everyone else. So here's your challenge today. Look at the information that you use most often and ask yourself one simple question, how old is it? Not when did you receive it? How old
was it when you received it. There's a huge difference. The answer may reveal blind spots you never knew existed, and once you identify those blind spots, you can begin shortening the gap between reality and response. Because in leadership, the quality of your decisions often depends on how quickly reality reaches your desk. So the next time you review a dashboard, a report, a spreadsheet, or an AI generated recommendation, pause for a moment and ask yourself how much lag
exists between this information and reality. That single question may completely change the way you lead. The leaders who thrive in the future won't be the ones with the most data, They'll be the ones closest to the truth. This has been the seven minute Leadership podcast, and I thank you for listening.
For more Paul Fell of Alito Podcasts, visit paulfellowalito dot com.