A short podcast from Jeff Dudan arguing that organizational latency—the time between knowing what must happen and taking action—harms business performance. Dudan recommends a practice he calls “rush to conflict”: promptly addressing problems with objective, non‑blaming conversations, clear ownership, and prioritized action to remove hesitation, ambiguity, and wasted time. He links this approach to team health (citing Lencioni) and contrasts early-stage scrappy startups with scaled organizations that develop silos and conflict aversion.
Chapters
Hey, home fronters. Is a lack of action or a delay in action creating latency in your business. And here's what I mean by latency. Latency is the time between the moment you understand what needs to happen and the time that it actually happens. Latency is a company killer. Latency is a production killer. Latency in your business, it delays everything, Everything. And it creates hesitation and all of these things. Now, I'm going to give you three little words here. And it's actually as a tip, it's the three words that I actually got my wife to marry me with. You know what those three little special words are? Don't you lower your standards. No, no, no, that's not it. That's a joke. Here's the three words. Rush to conflict. I learned late in my career that I was a little bit conflict averse. And here's what I mean by that. So maybe you'd be on a call or you're on a meeting and you recognize that something's not going the way it's supposed to go. You missed a deadline. There was a timeline or the vendor's not hitting their KPIs that were agreed to. All right, well, here's what the old Jeff would do. The old Jeff would say, well, who wants to own this? Let's set up a meeting with them. Maybe today's Tuesday. See if you can get them on the phone by the end of the week and ask them about this and see what's going on and report back next week. No good. If you're a small business or even if you're a big business, do you really have time for that? I mean, do you have time to wait a week to get something resolved and let the lack of performance go on? No, you absolutely don't. You need to rush to conflict. And I was in business with a guy, and here's what he would do. We'd be on the phone in that same exact meeting and we'd say, something's not going the way it's supposed to go. And he would say, hold on, he put me on hold. And he would come back and that person who we were talking about, who we were unsure if we were getting the result we wanted, they would be on the phone. Now here's the key. If you're going to rush to conflict, you can't show up and then blow up. You've got to build a methodology, you've got to build a practice. You've got to build an organization that can do this. You can show up and without the blow up. There's a great quote by Edwin Freeman and it says this. The person who can most accurately describe reality without laying blame shall emerge as the leader in those situations where you need to rush to conflict because something's not going the way it's supposed to. If you can show up and just be objective about it, don't start throwing people under the bus. Don't start saying, why don't you, why didn't this person, why didn't this get done? Be Ask assertive, ask questions, seek to understand and ultimately see if you can get a resolution to it. Because oftentimes the biggest thing that creates latency is a lack of clarity. When people are unclear about who's supposed to do what, when it's due, how it's supposed to happen, then they do three things. Number one, they make something up. Well, I'm not sure exactly what this is supposed to look like or how it's supposed to go. So let's try it this way. They just made something up, okay? Because they didn't have the information, they had a lack of clarity. Number two, they hesitate. They do whatever it is they're supposed to be doing, but they keep looking around and they do it slower and slower and slower to see if there's anybody that's going to, if it's going to work or oftentimes they'll do nothing. So making something up, hesitating, doing nothing, those are all symptoms of a lack of clarity. And when there's a lack of clarity, it creates latency. And when there's latency, you need to rush to conflict. So greatest thing, and now think about building an organization where you don't have this scenario. We have a meeting today, on Tuesday, you decide that people are supposed to deliver on some piece of work. So the next thing can happen after that. Now, but you don't put a timeline on it, you don't put a deadline on it. And you know when people are going to address that work. Probably 30 minutes before the meeting that next week. You just wasted an entire week having latency in your business because you didn't have clarity on when that was supposed to be delivered. So if you can build an organization that is constantly front loading the work saying, if this was important enough to be assigned to me, then it's important enough for me to do it with priority and to do it now. And oh, by the way, the expectation in this organization is that don't put off till tomorrow anything that you can do today. Then you will get latency out of your organization. And also, if you couple that with an organization that has the maturity to be able to have candid, crucial conversations and to march into any situation where something's not going well and rush to that conflict and resolve it quickly and effortlessly, you will have a healthy performing organization. When I learned about rushing to conflict and I started to use it as a practice in my business, it brings me back to this. Five Dysfunctions of a Team. Great book by Lencioni. I used to give it out and workshop on it, but there's three things inside of it. Number one, fear of conflict, which is exactly what we're talking about. Number two, absence of trust. Right. If I do have a conflict, what are going to be the repercussions to me? Is this person going to respond appropriately? Is it going to create problems for me down the road? And then the third one would be inattention to results. Like, if you give me something and I don't know how important it is, and I just put it on my pile of things to do, and it creates latency in the business because other people can't do their thing until I do my thing, that's going to defer. It's going to delay results. So healthy organizations, they run quickly. It's just like Navy seals. Like, they understand with clarity who's responsible for what, what this hand signal means, what we do in these situations, and they train these things. There's no latency between an action that happens in the field for a team of seals and what the resolution is and what they do about it. They're acting immediately. Your business needs to be exactly the same way. And to do that, you can't create all these sacred cows and all this artificial politeness between one another. And, oh, by the way, this, you know, this hierarchy of saying, well, you know, they have positional power, so I know what the better idea is, but I can't say it because it's not my position to say it. Look, as business leaders and business builders, it's about the best solution. It's about the best outcome. So it's not about who's right, it's about what's right. And it's about taking action today instead of putting it off till tomorrow. So at the core of all of this is rushing to conflict. Look, you want to respect organization where people respect each other, but you don't want an organization that is so polite that it gets in the way of having the conversations that need to be had so that your business can grow and be aggressive and take Advantage of opportunities. If you look in the mirror and if you are averse to conflict and this sounds like you kicking the can down the road, creating latency, then guess what? You're part of the problem and you need to be part of the solution. Look, you can say something to somebody. As long as you say it respectfully, as long as you say it truthfully and to the best of your ability, it's accurate. And you're not blaming people, talking about people and throwing them under the bus. You're just looking at the facts of the situation and you can move the ball forward. You will be free of all of this political stuff and all of this fear of saying, you know, I don't want to hurt somebody's feelings or I don't want this, or I don't want to make more work. Look, a clean, clear organization where everything is out in the open is the way that great businesses are built. Oh, by the way, most businesses, when they start, I don't care if you're Amazon sitting around that folding table or anything, is they start in a scrum. That's the beautiful thing about startups is, like, it's just a small group of people. Everybody's working together. There is no layers that create communication problems. And, and everybody's just dealing with the problem in the moment and moving forward. That's such a pure place for a business to be started at the very, very beginning when it's a scrum. Unfortunately, scrums don't scale. And when you start to put hierarchy and organization and departments and management and all that in place, that creates all of these silos and all of this conflict aversion and people making decisions on things like protecting their jobs that may or may not be in the best interest of the company. So having a nice balance between order and hierarchy and clarity about who's responsible for what and who's accountable for what results, and then also having an organization that can be like, you know what? I don't think that's right. This is a third time that this hasn't happened. We're continuing to lose time, energy and money on it, and this needs to be fixed. I didn't blame anybody. I just said, this is the situation and we need to fix it. So if you can be somebody that's known for rushing to conflict, but you can show up without blowing up the situation, you'll be valuable. You'll build better companies and you'll sleep better at night because you won't be sitting here thinking about all the stuff that you need to address that. You're afraid to go out and rush the conflict. Thank you.
