Hi everyone. If you don't know me, I'm Ryan. I've been a research partner and collaborator at Ei for a while now, and Sara and I have been deep in the work of building out our thinking on discontinuity leadership together. A lot of what Sara has been sharing with you over the past few months has had my fingerprints on it too. With Sara out on parental leave, I'm excited to step out from behind the curtain.

Fair warning: I'm an academic by training. I spend a lot of my time writing, but Wednesday Words is new territory. Here goes.

A few months ago, I was in a leadership session with a client when someone on the executive team got asked a question they clearly weren't ready for. Without missing a beat, they answered. Confidently. Completely. And, as it turned out, pretty much wrong. Not because they didn't know better, but because the room created a kind of gravity that made pausing feel like weakness.

I've been thinking about that moment. Because I don't think it was unusual. I think it's the default.

The speed mismatch nobody talks about

Someone asks a question in a meeting and you answer immediately. Someone sends an email and you respond within the hour. Your team brings you a problem and you give them direction on the spot.

However, if you had ten minutes instead of ten seconds, your answer would be different. If you had ten days, it would be different again. If you had ten months to sit with it, you'd probably make a completely different call. I’ve been calling this the 10/10/10 question. Your decisions would likely be different, not because you're indecisive, but because most complex decisions benefit from something we've systematically eliminated from organizational life: time to actually think.

We're making decisions at the speed the question arrives instead of the speed the decision requires. And those are almost never the same speed.

We've built systems that punish the gap

If you don't respond within a few hours, you look unresponsive. If you say "let me think about that and get back to you tomorrow," it reads as uncertainty. If you take a day to sit with a decision, someone else has already moved forward without you.

So we've eliminated the gap between stimulus and response.

That gap is where discernment lives. It's where you notice that the question being asked isn't actually the question that needs answering. It's where you realize the decision in front of you is a symptom of a different problem entirely. It's where you catch yourself about to apply a solution that worked three years ago to a situation now operating by completely different rules.

That last one is what keeps me up at night.

In discontinuous environments, where the cause-and-effect relationships that used to be reliable have shifted, the danger isn't that leaders don't have answers, it's that they have answers too quickly. Those answers are shaped by conditions that no longer exist, delivered with the confidence of experience, and at the speed of urgency.

An inertia problem disguised as an execution problem

Yet, the problem isn’t just about speed. It's about inertia. If your leadership team is making the same decision multiple times because the first attempt didn't stick, you probably don't have an execution problem. You have an inertia problem.

Inertia isn't about speed. It's a measure of resistance to changing state, and it depends entirely on mass. The bigger the organization, the more it resists changing direction, regardless of how fast it's moving. Speed is how fast you're going. Mass is what makes you hard to turn.

So, we've been focused on the wrong variable.

Every rushed call that gets walked back, every restructure that reverses itself by Q4, every 9pm email you regret by 9am: these don't just waste time. They accumulate. Unexamined assumptions, patterns that once worked and never got questioned, decisions made faster than they were understood. That's how organizations build mass. And mass is what makes the next decision harder, and the one after that harder still.

The 10/10/10 question isn't really about slowing down. It's about not adding weight you'll spend years trying to shed. Would my answer be different within ten minutes? Ten days? Ten months? If yes, the speed at which the question arrived is not the speed the decision requires.

The best decision-makers I know have learned to distinguish between decisions that require speed and decisions that only feel urgent. And they've built the muscle to say "I need a day with this" without apologizing for it.

Inertia is the most corrosive force in every organization. Not because it looks dramatic, but because it's invisible until you're already stuck.

The question worth asking

Next time something lands in your inbox or comes up in a meeting and your instinct is to respond immediately, ask yourself: would my answer be different if I had ten minutes? Ten days? Ten months?

If the answer is yes, the question isn't whether you can move fast. It's whether moving fast is actually what this decision requires.

Give the 10/10/10 question a try, and let us know how it goes!