The Speed of Wrong

Most leaders obsess over making the right decision. The best ones focus on fixing the wrong ones.

Speed without reversibility isn’t leadership. It’s gambling.

We’ve talked about decision velocity — how fast you make calls. But there’s an equally critical measure: how fast you correct them.

Decision Recovery Time (DRT) is the lag between realizing a bad decision has been made and taking corrective action. It’s the organizational equivalent of reaction time—how quickly you stop the bleeding and reset course.

Decision velocity measures how fast you act. DRT measures how fast you react when action was wrong. Both matter. But only one saves companies from catastrophic persistence.

In a compounding system, every day spent defending a bad call burns momentum. The real measure of maturity isn’t decision quality. It’s decision recovery speed.