Sixty Days: What the Signals Looked Like Before Anyone Read Them

The ordinary, unremarkable signs that a shift is already underway — reduced seats, silent prospects, the competitor nobody names — and why they are so easy to ignore.

Go back and look at the sixty days before almost any collapse, and it’s rarely dramatic. No single meeting where someone stood up and said the thing everyone was avoiding. Just a string of small, forgettable moments that made sense individually and only add up to something in hindsight.

A renewal that used to be automatic takes an extra week to sign. Someone mentions, almost in passing, that a deal is “still in review.” A seat that would have been backfilled without a second thought just… doesn’t get backfilled. None of it reads as a crisis. Each one has a perfectly reasonable explanation on its own. That’s exactly the problem.

The explanation is always available

This is the part that makes early signals so easy to miss — there’s never a shortage of plausible reasons to explain away any one of them. Budget season. A slow quarter. That client’s always been a little unpredictable. Every individual data point comes pre-loaded with an innocent story, and the innocent story is almost always more comfortable than the alternative.

Nobody’s being negligent when they accept the innocent story. It’s the correct move most of the time — most slow quarters really are just slow quarters. The trouble is that the same instinct that protects you from false alarms nine times out of ten is precisely what keeps you from noticing the tenth time, when the pattern is real.

Signals don’t arrive labeled

If a shift announced itself clearly, everyone would react to it immediately, and that’s not really how it works. What actually shows up is something closer to noise with a very faint signal buried in it — and the only way to find the signal is to already be looking, before you have a good reason to.

A prospect who used to reply within a day starts taking three. Someone on the team mentions, almost as an aside, that they ran into a competitor’s product during a client call — a competitor that wasn’t on anyone’s radar six months ago. Usage numbers stay flat instead of climbing, which doesn’t sound alarming until you remember they’d been climbing steadily for two years before that. None of these are alarms. They’re just data with the volume turned all the way down.

Why “wait and see” feels safer than it is

The instinct to wait for more data is a reasonable one. Acting on a false signal has real costs — you redirect resources, you spook a team, you reorganize around a threat that turns out not to be one. So the bar for action tends to be set high, and reasonably so.

But the cost of waiting isn’t symmetric with the cost of a false alarm, and that’s the part that’s easy to lose track of. A false alarm costs you a few weeks of misallocated attention. Waiting too long on a real signal costs you the sixty days when you still had options. By the time the pattern is undeniable — three lost deals in a row, not one; a whole segment gone quiet, not one account — you’re no longer choosing your response. You’re just executing whatever’s left.

What actually catches this

Not more dashboards. Most organizations already have more data than anyone looks at. What’s usually missing is someone whose job is specifically to ask, on a regular cadence, whether this quarter’s version of “normal” still matches last year’s — not because anything looks wrong, but because that’s the only way anything gets caught while it’s still small.

It also means treating a pattern across small things differently than any one small thing on its own. One slow renewal means nothing. Three slow renewals from different, unrelated clients in the same six weeks means something, even if each one still has a perfectly good individual explanation. The individual explanations can all be true and the pattern can still be real — those aren’t actually in conflict, even though it feels like picking one over the other.

The sixty-day habit

If there’s a practical version of this, it’s smaller than it sounds: once a quarter, sit down and ask what’s quietly changed that nobody’s mentioned in a meeting. Not what’s broken — what’s just slightly different than it used to be, in a way that hasn’t been worth raising yet. Write it down even when it seems minor. Especially when it seems minor.

Most of what you write down will turn out to be nothing. That’s fine — that’s what most signals turn out to be. But the one time it isn’t nothing, you’ll have sixty days of head start instead of noticing it the same week everyone else does, which is usually the week it’s too late to do much about.

This is the interval the novel lives inside.

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