Hi all, and happy Wednesday. Ryan here again.

Last time I wrote, I talked about the gap between the speed of a question and the speed a decision actually requires. I made a claim in passing that I want to spend more time on today.

Inertia is the most corrosive force in every organization.

It's easy to hear "inertia" as a complaint about bureaucracy or slowness. That's not what I mean.

What inertia actually is

In physics, inertia isn't about speed. It's a measure of an object's resistance to changing its state of motion. And it depends entirely on mass, not velocity. A fast-moving object isn't necessarily hard to redirect. A massive one is, regardless of how fast it's going.

Organizations work the same way.

We spend enormous energy talking about velocity. How quickly decisions get made, how fast teams move, how rapidly the organization can respond to change. But velocity is the wrong variable. You can move fast and still be nearly impossible to turn.

That mass is made of accumulated decisions that never got revisited, assumptions that stopped being tested, patterns that once worked and never got questioned. Every time a leader answers a question faster than they understand it, they add to it. Every restructure that reverses itself by Q4 adds to it. Every 9pm email you regret by 9am adds to it.

And size matters here, but maybe not in the way you'd expect. A 50-person company carries less mass, but it also has less tolerance for the cost of it. One bad hire, one misfired strategy, one season of decisions made faster than they were understood, and you feel it everywhere immediately. At a 40,000-person enterprise, the same decisions get absorbed into the system and disappear. The problem doesn't go away. It just gets harder to see, and the mass keeps building long after anyone would have noticed it in a smaller organization. Scale doesn't protect you from inertia. It just delays the moment you realize how much you've accumulated.

Not because any single one of those is catastrophic. But because they accumulate. And mass compounds. What makes an organization genuinely adaptive isn't how quickly it moves. It's how little accumulated mass it carries.

Why discontinuity makes this worse

In a stable environment, organizational inertia is expensive but manageable. You carry some weight, you move a little slower, but the direction you're heading is roughly right and the cost of that mass stays contained.

Discontinuity changes that calculus completely.

Discontinuity isn't disruption. It's not a difficult market or a challenging quarter. It's the moment when the causal relationships that used to hold stop holding. When what worked reliably before stops being a trustworthy guide to what will work next. When the map genuinely stops matching the territory.

In that environment, mass isn't just expensive. It's dangerous. Because the organization is carrying the weight of assumptions built for a world that no longer exists, and that weight makes it nearly impossible to change direction when change is exactly what's required.

This is why I've seen highly experienced leadership teams, filled with smart and capable people, keep producing the same failed outcomes. It's not a talent problem. It's not a motivation problem. It's a mass problem. The organization has accumulated so much weight from the old environment that it can't turn into the new one, no matter how fast it's trying to move.

The invisible part

What makes inertia so corrosive is that it doesn't announce itself.

Disruption is visible. A market shift, a competitor move, a technology change: you can point to it. Inertia operates in the background. It shows up as decisions that feel right but don't stick. As strategies that made sense on paper but couldn't get traction. As a persistent gap between what the organization intends and what it actually produces.

By the time most organizations recognize they have an inertia problem, they've been accumulating mass for years.

And here's the part that's hardest to sit with: the mass is often built from good decisions. Decisions that were right for the environment that existed when they were made. The assumptions weren't wrong. The patterns weren't dysfunctional. They just stopped being true, quietly, over time, while everyone kept acting as if they still were.

What to do about it

The answer isn't to move slower. It's to become deliberate about what you carry.

This starts with naming assumptions before acting on them. Most organizations move directly from problem to solution without ever surfacing the beliefs underneath the solution. Those beliefs are where the mass lives. When you bring them into the open, you create the possibility of questioning them. When they stay implicit, they just accumulate. Erin wrote about how to start doing this in our last Wednesday Words.

The second thing is to treat revisiting decisions as normal practice, not as failure. One of the ways organizations build mass is by treating the need to change course as an admission that the original decision was wrong. So leaders defend the original call instead of updating it. The weight grows. A team that can say "we made this call with what we knew, here's what we know now, here's what we're changing" is a team that can stay light enough to actually turn.

The third is the hardest. It requires senior leaders to be honest about which of their most deeply held beliefs were formed in a context that no longer exists. Experience is not the same as current knowledge. The assumptions that built a career are not the same as the assumptions that will navigate what comes next.

That's not an indictment of experience. It's an invitation to hold it more lightly.

The question worth sitting with

If your organization keeps arriving at the same problems, keeps remaking the same decisions, keeps running into the same friction: the question isn't what's wrong with the execution.

The question is what you're carrying that's making it impossible to turn.

Inertia is invisible until you're already stuck. The work is to see it before then.