Success Takes Time to Build. Failure Takes Time to Show.
It takes time to achieve anything meaningful.
Work, learning and improvement compound over time. None of them pay out much in the first month, or the first year. Then, slowly, the results improve. What looked like no progress turns out to have been foundations. And eventually the compounding helps us achieve the dreams and goals we set out for.
We know this. We tell it to graduates, to new starters, to ourselves on the difficult days. Keep going. It takes time.
What we rarely say is that the same sentence is just as true on the way down.
It takes time.
What happens once we arrive
Once we get there and enjoy the pleasures of growth and success, it also takes time to lose our position and achievements.
That is the part that makes it dangerous. Nothing collapses the week after we succeed. The next quarter is fine. So is the one after it. We think we will continue to be successful and keep growing, because every piece of evidence in front of us says so.
Yet, through complacency, ignorance and overconfidence, seeds of failure are embedded by our own decisions.
They do not look like seeds of failure when they are planted. They look like reasonable decisions. Skipping a review because the last five were clean. Not questioning a process because it has always worked. Hiring people who agree with us, because agreement feels like alignment. Dismissing a small warning because we have seen off bigger ones.
Each decision on its own is defensible. Together, they are a slow leak.
With a matter of time, the ship sinks into the water, and many can’t see it happening, because it takes time.
Why the decline is so hard to see
When failure is fast, it is obvious. A system goes down. A contract is lost. A key person resigns. Everyone sees it, and everyone responds.
When failure is slow, it hides inside normal. Each day looks much like the day before. The drop is too small to notice between one meeting and the next, and by the time it becomes visible in the numbers, it has usually been underway for years.
Success makes this worse. It gives us a story about ourselves, that we are the kind of organisation, or the kind of person, who gets things right. That story is comforting, and it filters what we notice. Evidence that fits the story is taken in. Evidence that doesn’t gets explained away as a one-off.
Consider a council that implemented its finance system fifteen years ago, and did it well. The project came in close to budget. Other councils visited to see how it was done. The team that delivered it was rightly proud.
Over the years, small things accumulated. A customisation here, because the standard process didn’t quite fit. A spreadsheet there, to cover a report the system couldn’t produce. An upgrade deferred, because the current version was stable and the budget was needed elsewhere. The people who understood the original design moved on, one at a time, and their knowledge left with them.
No single year was a bad year. Every year, the system still ran payroll and paid suppliers. Every year, the decision to leave it alone was reasonable.
And then one day the vendor announces end of support, and the organisation discovers it is sitting on a platform nobody fully understands, held together by workarounds nobody documented, with a gap to modern practice that would now take years to close.
The system didn’t fail suddenly. It took fifteen years. That is exactly why nobody saw it.
Patience on the way up, attention at the top
What we therefore need is a lot of patience uphill, and a steady eye on ourselves once we arrive.
Patience uphill is the familiar part. Keep working, keep learning, keep improving, and let the compounding do its job.
The less familiar part is what we watch once things are going well. Not just results, which lag, but the things that produce results:
Our behaviours. What we have stopped doing because we no longer feel we need to. The checks we skip. The questions we no longer ask.
Our belief systems. What we now assume to be true about ourselves, our market, our people, our systems, and when we last tested it.
Our culture. Whether people still feel able to say that something isn’t working, or whether success has quietly made bad news unwelcome.
These are where the seeds get planted. Watching them is how we make sure we are not sowing seeds of failure out of ignorance and pride.
Keep an open mind about what we observe
The last discipline is the simplest to state and the hardest to hold: keep an open mind about everything we observe.
Success narrows the mind. It tells us we already know how things work. An open mind is the willingness to look at the small warning and consider that it might not be small. To treat the thing that doesn’t fit the story as information, rather than noise.
It takes time to build something meaningful. It also takes time to lose it. The difference is that the building is visible and the losing is not.
So the question worth sitting with is not whether things are going well. It is this.
If the seeds of your next failure were already planted, in a decision that felt entirely reasonable at the time, would you be able to see them?
