I’ve been fortunate to have mentors who fundamentally changed how I think about leading projects and scaling operations. This is part of an ongoing series where I share the insights that have stayed with me — because the best lessons shouldn’t sit with one person.
This one also came from A.B. Six words that still give me a cold feeling when I hear them:
“How come we didn’t find out earlier?”
The question nobody wants to be asked
If you’ve led a project — any project — you know exactly what this question means when it gets asked. Something went wrong. Something that could have been avoided. And somebody in the room wants to understand why the warning signs weren’t caught sooner.
I still remember the first time I was on the receiving end of that question. The feeling of “how could I have not seen it coming?” stays with you. It’s uncomfortable. But it’s also one of the most useful pieces of feedback a leader can receive — if they’re willing to learn from it.
What the question is really telling you
When that question gets asked, it almost always means one of two things.
Either the risks weren’t properly mapped at the start of the project — so nobody was looking for the warning signs. Or the warning signs were there, but the team was moving too fast, too reactively, to notice them.
Both are process improvement failures. Both are preventable.
Developing a product or scaling an operation always involves risk. That’s unavoidable. But risk without a structured process to identify, assess, and monitor it is where business bottlenecks are born — the kind that don’t show up until they’ve already caused real damage.
Leading the project vs being led by it
There’s a distinction I came back to repeatedly during my years at Ferrari and Rimac-Bugatti: the difference between leading a project and being led by one.
When you’re leading, you’re ahead of the problems. You’ve mapped the risks. You know what could go wrong, how likely it is, and what the consequences would be. You’re not waiting to react — you’re actively managing the conditions that determine whether the project succeeds.
When the project is leading you, you’re always reacting. Problems surface when they become impossible to ignore. Decisions get made under pressure. The team is firefighting instead of executing. And operational efficiency collapses — not because the work is hard, but because the process never caught up with the complexity.
Building an operation that catches problems early
The answer to “how come we didn’t find out earlier?” is always a process improvement question.
What risk assessment process was in place at the start? What were the checkpoints? What early indicators were being tracked? Who was responsible for flagging when something was trending in the wrong direction?
These aren’t complicated systems to build. But they require intentionality — a deliberate decision to slow down at the start of a project in order to move faster through it.
The businesses I work with across Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia that struggle most with operational efficiency are rarely struggling because the work is too hard. They’re struggling because problems compound silently until they become business bottlenecks that are expensive and slow to resolve.
The fix is almost always the same: clearer processes, earlier visibility, and a team that is leading the operation rather than being led by it.
The lesson that stays
If you’ve been asked “how come we didn’t find out earlier?” — take it seriously. Not as a criticism, but as a diagnostic. It’s telling you exactly where your process improvement work needs to focus.
And if you haven’t been asked it yet — build the processes now that ensure you never have to answer it.
Lead the project. Don’t let it lead you.
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