The Cost of Waiting Until It’s Broken

There’s an old saying in business and life: “Don’t fix it unless it’s broken.”

It sounds practical, even wise. Why waste effort changing something that still works? But in reality, this mindset often holds back progress more than it protects success.

When business is booming and the cash cow is minting, companies feel no urgency to innovate. Why disrupt a winning formula? That’s precisely how once-dominant players like Kodak lost their edge; they assumed today’s success guaranteed tomorrow’s survival. The market changed faster than they did, and by the time they reacted, it was too late.

The same applies to personal careers. Many professionals believe disruption won’t touch their role, or that the skills that brought them here will carry them forward. But as Marshall Goldsmith’s book title reminds us: What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. Success in the past is no guarantee of relevance in the future.

When change finally becomes unavoidable, incremental fixes rarely cut it. The light bulb didn’t emerge from endless iterations of the candle; it required a leap, not a tweak.

Timing is everything. If you want to be on time, you don’t leave five minutes past nine. You leave five minutes to nine. By the time most people and organizations finally take action, the window of opportunity has already closed.

The real cost of waiting until it’s broken is this: by then, you’re already behind.

So ask yourself, are you challenging the status quo while things still work, or are you waiting for them to fall apart first?

Fawad A. Qureshi Transforming Business with AI, Data & Sustainability 🌎 | Field C…

I write weekly on different topics related to Data and AI. Feel free to subscribe to FAQ on Data newsletter and/or follow Fawad Qureshi on LinkedIn or FawadQureshi on X.