Market Share Can be Lost In The Organizational Layers Between Signal And Decisions

Most competitive surprises aren't really surprises. The signal that a small rival is gaining ground usually shows up early, sitting in a report or an offhand comment from someone close to the data, months before it becomes a headline about lost share. The problem is rarely detection. It's that the person who spots the signal often lacks the standing to make anyone act, and by the time the warning carries enough weight to move the organization, the threat has already arrived.

Todd Hassenfelt, Chief Decision Officer at Firstmovr, has spent his career in brick-and-mortar and e-commerce leadership roles across sales and marketing teams at both challenger and established brands. In his current role, he helps organizations ask sharper questions, make commercial decisions faster, and carry them from insight to action. In Hassenfelt's view, the bottleneck throttling most companies isn't the quality of their information, but the speed at which they let themselves act on it.

"The organizations aren't keeping up with the speed of information because they aren't keeping up with the speed of decision-making," he says. The gap between what a company knows and what it will authorize is where competitive ground gets lost, and closing it means rethinking who inside the organization is allowed to move.

Credibility decides which signals survive

The first casualty of a slow decision system is the signal carried by the wrong messenger. Hassenfelt describes a familiar dynamic in which the person closest to the data, often on a fast-growing but still-small part of the business, can't get a meeting because they lack a recognizable name. The same claim lands differently depending on who makes it, and a well-known consultancy or agency of record can move a boardroom that someone closer to the signal can't.

"If a big-name global consultancy or agency of record would share the same signal the analyst did, it would hold more weight," Hassenfelt says. The trouble is that the bigger the name, the greater the incentive to protect the existing strategy, because that strategy was often built with those same names attached. A promising early warning gets one brief meeting, gets waved off by a trusted outside voice as a nothing-burger, and disappears until the day a competitor lands on the shelf at Walmart or Costco and the same leaders ask how it happened.

Working the signal backward

When that day comes, Hassenfelt's response is to reconstruct the timeline so the organization learns to trust the signal sooner next time. He compares it to running an investigation in reverse, tracing a competitor's rise from its first traction on Amazon through a viral moment and into wider distribution, then laying that sequence next to the early warning that went unheeded. "You do this not to say 'I told you so,' but to show the signals that you didn't act upon or missed so that as you move forward in the future, maybe some of those get listened to a little quicker," he explains. 

The point of the exercise is credibility. By showing exactly where the signal first appeared and how it compounded, a savvy operator builds the case that similar signals deserve a faster meeting in the future. It's a way of converting a missed call into higher credibility, so the next early warning travels through the organization with less friction than the last one.

Borrow the model finance already uses

The structural fix Hassenfelt proposes is to stop routing every decision to the top. In most organizations, the people closest to the signal get one or two chances a year to present upward, compressed into a bulleted page that strips out the nuance, to executives who often never worked hands-on in the channels now driving change and growth. That arrangement asks leaders to shortcut a shortcut, and it produces decisions made on too little information or on information sanded down to look reassuring.

His alternative borrows a mechanism finance has used for years. "You typically have tiers, depending on your grade level or your title, of how much you can authorize for a scope of work or for a budget." He'd like to see that same tiered logic applied to decisions rather than dollars. Sort choices by what they would cost the company if wrong or gain if right, then grant more organizational layers defined authority to act within set limits. The speed of small competitors, unburdened by layers, is precisely what makes this urgent. An organization that can only decide once a quarter can't answer rivals moving in real time.

AI exposes the broken process rather than fixing it

Hassenfelt is direct about the limits of technology as a substitute for this work. Automation can summarize, alert, and crunch data, but he cautions that it doesn't repair the underlying dysfunction. "AI is not causing a lot of the data or process issues. It's just exposing the ones that have never been addressed or fixed currently," he notes.

The risk multiplies when agents are layered onto disconnected processes and incomplete data. If every department builds its own agents on top of information that's inaccurate or missing key pieces, the organization amplifies bad decisions while leadership trusts them more precisely because they came from AI. He points to revenue growth management as a likely point of failure: e-commerce pricing and the sheer number of online SKUs rarely make it into the model, so an AI tool applied to that partial picture can misdiagnose the situation entirely. "You may run more price promotions when in reality, people are buying it once at a physical store and then they go buy in bulk online at a club or on Amazon. And you may say, 'I lost that customer.' No, you didn't. We just weren't tracking it."

Scorecards that are all green should scare you

The cultural shift underneath all of this is a different relationship with bad news. Hassenfelt distills it into two phrases he uses to rally teams: progress over perfection, and plan for pivots, not perfection. An all-green scorecard, in his view, should alarm a board rather than reassure it, because it almost certainly hides what's actually happening.

He speaks from experience, having struggled to secure budget for digital shelf until the scorecard finally showed red and yellow. "Well, of course, because if they think everything is green and perfect, why do they need to allocate more money?" he says. In this case, and in many others, honest red and yellow marks are what win a team the attention and investment it needs. That only works if leadership is prepared for it, choosing to ask what would move a metric to green instead of criticizing the person who surfaced the problem.