Your absence test was shorter than your decision cycle

A fortnight away without incident is often taken as proof the business runs itself. It usually proves something much narrower than that.

By Steve 5 min read
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An owner takes two weeks off, keeps the phone mostly closed, and comes back to find nothing on fire. The conclusion drawn is that the business no longer depends on them. It is a comforting reading, and it is frequently wrong, not because the fortnight went badly, but because a fortnight only tests the decisions that arise inside a fortnight. Key-person dependence isn’t a single quantity. It is distributed across decisions with very different frequencies, and an absence only probes the ones whose cycle is shorter than the absence itself.…

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