Perspective I

Kristyn Rankin · August 2026

There is a moment in almost every consequential business decision when you know enough to act — but not enough to be certain.

It's an uncomfortable place.

The signals are there, but they don't all point neatly in the same direction. The data is incomplete. The regulatory outcome isn't settled. The technology hasn't been fully proven. Customers may be saying one thing and doing another.

There are good reasons to wait.

But waiting has a cost too.

We tend to think of uncertainty as risk. And, of course, it is.

What we don't always consider is the risk of waiting for uncertainty to disappear.

Consider packaging.

Years before today's wave of packaging regulation began taking shape, some companies were already reducing plastics, redesigning packaging and investing in alternative materials.

They didn't know exactly which regulations would pass, where or when.

They couldn't.

But they could see what was happening around them.

Concern about plastic waste was growing. Recycling systems were struggling. Governments were paying more attention. New materials were emerging. Customers were beginning to expect something different.

No single signal provided an answer.

Together, they began to form a pattern.

Companies that acted on that pattern gained something enormously valuable: time.

They could try things that didn't work.

They could discover that changing packaging might also mean changing equipment, suppliers, logistics or even the product itself. They could find the unintended consequences while there was still time to do something about them.

And they could learn before everyone else was trying to learn the same things at the same time.

By the time regulation began turning some of those early signals into requirements, these companies weren't beginning the transition.

They had already been learning from it.

One of the greatest advantages of moving before certainty isn't simply being first.

It's having time to be wrong.

Strategic change rarely announces itself.

It accumulates.

A proposed regulation. A shift in customer behavior. A technology that isn't quite ready. A supplier doing something differently. A competitor making an investment that doesn't yet make obvious sense.

Any one of those can be dismissed.

The harder question is whether seemingly unrelated developments are beginning to point in the same direction.

That's where context matters.

What is changing around the issue? Which forces are reinforcing one another? Which ones look temporary? What becomes possible if several continue?

And what happens if we wait?

The goal isn't to predict precisely what will happen.

It's to recognize enough of the pattern to decide whether doing something now gives us an advantage later.

Regulation is one of the clearest examples.

Requirements matter. They establish boundaries and accountability. They tell organizations what they must do.

They're important guardrails.

But guardrails don't tell you where the road is going.

If we're only asking What will we be required to do?, we may miss the more useful question:

What is already changing around us, and what might it mean?

By the time a requirement is final, much of the uncertainty may indeed be gone.

So may some of the opportunity.

Suppliers may be constrained. Competitors may already know what works. Customers may have moved on. Decisions that could have been tested gradually may suddenly have to be made quickly.

None of this means acting on every signal.

Some disappear. Technologies fail. Regulations don't materialize. Predictions are wrong.

Seeing a possible direction isn't a reason to bet the company on it.

Sometimes it's a reason to try something small.

Run a pilot. Test an assumption. Talk to a different supplier. Develop a capability. Make an investment small enough to reverse but meaningful enough to teach you something.

The point isn't necessarily to commit to a particular future.

It's to learn while that future is still taking shape.

Which changes the question.

Instead of:

Are we certain enough to act?

Try:

What could we do now that would make us better prepared to decide later?

There will always be times when waiting is the right decision.

But waiting isn't the absence of a decision.

It's a decision too.

And it has consequences.

Seeing around corners isn't about predicting the future.

It's recognizing when enough separate things are beginning to form a pattern and deciding whether that pattern matters.

You don't have to know for certain.

That's the point.

Because by the time the answer is obvious, the advantage may already be gone.