By the time a crisis is visible, the decisive moment has usually passed. The rupture that reaches the headlines was months in the making — in postponed conversations, in a shareholder who stopped asking questions, in a board that started agreeing too easily.
The signals are quiet and consistent: information that arrives late or pre-digested, disagreements that move off the record, a founder who is protected from bad news. None of these is dramatic on its own. Together, they describe a system losing its ability to correct itself.
The advantage goes to those who treat these signals as data, not noise — who intervene while the situation is still shapeable, before positions harden and the only options left are expensive ones.