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.

What DRT Actually Measures

DRT isn’t abstract. It’s measurable—the time from signal to correction:

• Product feature: from “users hate this” to “disabled and replaced.”
• Pricing: from “conversion dropped” to “new pricing live.”
• Partnership: from “this isn’t working” to “exit executed.”
• Strategy: from “ROI projections were fantasy” to “resources reallocated.”

These aren’t hypotheticals. They’re the moments that determine whether your organization adapts or calcifies.

The DRT Benchmark Framework

Recovery time defines competitive tempo. The shorter your DRT, the faster your organization learns.

World-class SaaS: Less than 72 hours from signal to pivot

• Automated detection triggers review
• Clear rollback procedures
• Authority distributed to act

Competitive: 1–2 weeks

• Manual detection but rapid response
• Documented reversal paths
• Some approval friction

At-risk: More than 30 days

• Slow signal recognition
• Committee-based decisions
• Ego protection systems

The gap between a 3-day DRT and a 30-day DRT isn’t incremental. It’s the difference between market leadership and irrelevance.

DRT Self-Assessment

1. Last major decision you reversed: How long did it take? Count from the moment you privately knew it wasn’t working, not when you publicly admitted it.
2. How many decisions are you defending that you privately know aren’t working? The number reveals whether your culture rewards adaptation or consistency.
3. What would need to be true to cut your organization’s DRT in half? If the answer is “nothing structural, just courage,” you have a leadership problem, not a systems problem.

Most DRT problems start with leaders who can’t admit they were wrong fast enough.

The Hidden Tax of Certainty

The pursuit of certainty feels responsible. It’s a tax on momentum that compounds daily.

Every hour spent waiting for more data, more consensus, or more clarity is an hour you could’ve been learning through action. Perfect information rarely arrives on time. The opportunity cost of waiting—the decisions not made, the feedback not gathered—is the hidden tax most leaders pay for certainty.

The irony? The longer you wait, the less reversible the decision becomes. Momentum hardens. Options narrow. Delay turns errors into sinkholes.

The DRT Killers

Specific organizational antibodies slow recovery:

• Sunk Cost Fallacy: “We’ve invested $2M already” becomes justification to invest $2M more into failure.
• Psychological Safety Failure: When admitting wrong feels like admitting incompetence, teams defend mistakes instead of fixing them.
• Process Paralysis: When reversing a decision requires the same documentation, sign-off, and slide deck as making it, speed dies.
• Optics Management: Quarterly narratives that demand consistency over adaptability trap leaders in bad strategies.

These aren’t edge cases. They’re the default state of most enterprises. Breaking them takes deliberate system redesign.

How to Shorten Recovery Time

Automate Detection Build feedback loops that flag deviations early. Customer usage drops, conversion rate changes, support ticket patterns—anything that surfaces reality faster shortens recovery time. DRT only works in high-trust environments where admitting wrong doesn’t equal blame. That’s why trust architecture is foundational.

Design Reversibility Build safe rollback paths. Make it easy to undo a change without shame or ceremony. The harder it is to reverse, the longer you’ll delay admitting it’s wrong. Feature flags, graduated rollouts, and kill switches aren’t just technical tools—they’re the foundation for adaptive leadership.

Normalize Iteration Treat course correction as a KPI, not a confession. The goal isn’t to avoid mistakes; it’s to shorten the half-life of bad ones. When your team sees you reverse a $500K commitment in 48 hours because the data changed, they learn that adaptation beats consistency.

Reward Learning, Not Luck Don’t celebrate accuracy. Celebrate adjustment. The team that spots and fixes a bad call in a day is more valuable than the one that got lucky on their first try.

The Leadership Reframe

Old model: leaders are judged by how often they’re right. New model: leaders are judged by how fast they recover when they’re not.

Credibility doesn’t come from being right. It comes from responsiveness. Leaders who recover fast don’t lose authority—they earn it. When teams see leaders admit mistakes and pivot quickly, trust compounds. It shows that the cost of being wrong is low and the reward for learning is high.

Slow recovery is usually a symptom of fear: fear of blame, fear of losing face, fear of being seen as indecisive. In modern systems, indecision is the only failure that scales.

The CEO Perspective

Board-Level Framing Your board doesn’t need to hear that you made the perfect call on the acquisition. They need to hear that when integration started failing, you pivoted the strategy in 10 days, not 10 months. Boards reward reversibility.

Valuation Impact Investors reward adaptability as much as vision. A company that can reverse bad bets quickly is less risky than one that can’t, even if the second makes fewer initial mistakes. DRT becomes a de-risking metric that influences valuation.

Succession Planning Leaders who build low-DRT organizations create inheritable advantage. The system recovers fast regardless of who’s making calls. That’s how you build something that outlasts your tenure.

At scale, low DRT isn’t a personality trait. It’s a system property.

DRT vs. Your Other Metrics

DRT is the missing middle metric between decision velocity (how fast you decide) and learning velocity (how fast you improve). Together, they form a loop:

Decision Velocity → Decision Recovery Time → Learning Velocity
(Act)                     (Adapt)                     (Advance)

You need all three. Decision velocity without DRT creates catastrophic momentum in the wrong direction. Learning velocity without DRT means you study mistakes instead of fixing them. DRT without decision velocity means you’re fast at reversing decisions you were too slow to make.

Learning loops show you what to improve. DRT shows you how fast you improve it. The loop is the system. DRT is the speed.

The Provocation

In a compounding system, being wrong for a week costs more than being wrong entirely.

The advantage isn’t perfect judgment. It’s fast correction.

This week, audit one recent decision that aged badly. How long did it take you to correct it? That’s your Decision Recovery Time.

Because in AI-accelerated markets, your competitor’s 3-day DRT is crushing your 30-day version while you’re still writing the postmortem.