If I asked you how long it took your leadership team to commit to a hard decision the last time something broke, would you know the number?
Not how long the analysis took. Not how many briefing sessions were convened. The actual leadership decision speeds from signal to commitment.
Most leaders I put this question to cannot answer it. The honest ones acknowledge they have never measured it. This absence is not trivial; without quantifying decision speed, organisations cannot assess, refine, or optimise this critical aspect of leadership effectiveness. If you have not measured the number, you certainly have not intentionally designed processes to enhance or manage it.
This week provided a real one. On 28 February, coordinated strikes on Iran triggered the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Vessel traffic dropped by roughly 70%. The cost of hiring a supertanker from the Middle East to China doubled to over US$400,000 a day. Qatar shut down the world’s largest LNG export facility, which accounted for about a fifth of global supply.
In Singapore, the impact landed on multiple fronts simultaneously. Energy costs. Shipping routes. Trade finance. Capital exposure across the Gulf. DPM Gan flagged the possibility of reassessing Singapore’s full-year GDP forecast. Firms across logistics, manufacturing, and financial services found themselves needing to act faster than their structures allowed.
The pattern is consistent. I’ve written about it before as Decision Velocity: the elapsed time between a disruption signal and a committed organisational response.
The data arrives quickly. The analysis follows within hours. What stalls is authority.
A procurement head needs sign-off to change a supplier contract. A regional logistics lead needs the MD's approval for a client communication. A treasury function needs the CFO to release contingency funding. These conversations happen one after another because nobody agreed on the authority thresholds before the event.
When I put the 72-hour test to leadership teams (“How long from signal to commitment last time?”), Someone usually says, “Well, it depends on the situation.”
That is precisely the issue. When each situation necessitates renegotiating decision-making authority, the resulting delays ensure that leadership responses consistently lag behind the pace of disruption, undermining the organisation’s ability to respond effectively.
Standard business continuity planning assumes disruptions have defined boundaries. One supply route is blocked. One market shifts. You activate the protocol, follow the steps, and recover.
The Hormuz crisis does not work that way. It hits Singapore simultaneously through energy, shipping, raw materials, insurance, capital markets, and trade finance. The exposure vectors are interconnected and moving at different speeds. A playbook designed for a single point of failure cannot withstand a multi-vector disruption in which the interactions between vectors themselves create new risks.
This is the problem many leaders who bring a London or New York framework to Singapore discover after the fact. The operating context is structurally different. The interdependencies among APAC economies, regulatory regimes, and cultural decision-making norms mean that a plan designed for a Western boardroom will play out differently here. Sometimes it won’t execute at all.
The version of this story I hear most often goes like this: “The plan was written at headquarters. It assumed we’d lose one supplier.” Then the disruption arrives, and it isn’t from a single supplier. It’s an entire shipping corridor, insurance rates tripling, and a JV partner in the Gulf going dark simultaneously. The plan covered none of it. In APAC, multi-vector disruptions are the baseline scenario, not the exception.
The same design failure shows up in quieter settings.
This week, Nikkei Asia reported that Grab’s financial services arm has been charging Philippine motorcycle riders effective annual interest rates exceeding 230% on in-app loans. Lending disbursements grew 53% year-on-year to nearly US$1 billion. The gross loan portfolio doubled to US$1.2 billion.
Every metric on the lending dashboard was green.
The riders borrowing that money earn roughly 1,000 pesos a day. After automatic daily deductions from their in-app wallets, some were functionally locked into the platform. If their account ran short, bookings were suspended. The terms appeared in the conditions. The rates sat within the legal framework. The product worked exactly as designed.
That is the problem. Nobody at Grab needed to ask an uncomfortable question, because the dashboard was built to track disbursement volume, not borrower outcomes. What gets measured gets managed. What doesn’t get measured doesn’t get seen.
Ask yourself this: if you pulled up the performance dashboard for your most profitable product line right now, does it show you anything about the experience on the other end? If it doesn’t, you’re looking at the same blind spot. Just with different numbers.
Whether it’s a geopolitical shock that demands a 48-hour response or a steady-state product quietly compounding borrower debt, the structural failure is the same. Someone designed a system for tracking performance without defining what performance actually means for everyone inside it.
If your last crisis response took longer than 72 hours from signal to commitment, that gap was set months earlier. Someone avoided the conversation about who gets to act, under what conditions, without committee approval.
If your product dashboard shows growth across every column but no one has asked what the experience looks like from the other end of the transaction, the same gap applies.
Leadership teams should promptly assess their decision-making processes and performance metrics. This includes clearly identifying and recording who has the authority to act during different crisis scenarios, and ensuring dashboards feature indicators that show stakeholder outcomes alongside operational targets. Implementing these measures before the next disruption helps strengthen the organization and reduces the risk of external scrutiny caused by overlooked design gaps.