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{{First Name | My friend}},
In 2011, Boeing faced a decision that couldn't wait.
Airbus had launched the A320neo the previous December, and it was winning customers fast. Boeing's response was the 737 MAX — a re-engined program designed to compete without the cost or timeline of building an entirely new aircraft. The competitive logic was sound. The market pressure was real. And the direction, once set, moved quickly.
What made it a tradeoff was what had to be absorbed to move at that speed.
When the cost feels manageable in the room
The gains were visible: competitive positioning, customer commitments, and delivery timelines that kept Boeing in the race.
To accommodate the larger, more fuel-efficient engines, Boeing repositioned them further forward and higher on the wing. That change altered the aircraft's handling characteristics — enough that Boeing developed MCAS specifically to compensate. Rather than restructure the airframe, Boeing opted for a software solution to make the MAX feel like the 737 models pilots already knew.
Embedded in that choice was a tradeoff that would shape everything that followed.
Boeing had committed to keeping pilot transition requirements at a level that didn't require simulator training. That commitment was so significant that Boeing had agreed to pay Southwest Airlines $1 million per aircraft if that threshold was crossed.1
The tradeoff wasn't hidden. It was present in the room.
But the competitive pressure made fully carrying it feel like a cost the program couldn't afford.
What uncarried tradeoffs do
They don't resolve on their own — and they don't wait for a convenient moment to surface.
They migrate through the system, moving from the decision layer into execution, where they reappear as pressure, friction, and assumptions that were never made explicit. One of those assumptions — that pilots would recognize and respond to an unexpected MCAS activation within three seconds — was later identified by the U.S. House Transportation Committee as fundamentally faulty.2 And that was only one layer of what had been left unresolved.
What the competitive pressure moment in 2011 set in motion didn't stay contained at the decision layer. It traveled forward through the system, and each subsequent decision was built on top of what the previous one left unresolved.
The last decision's uncarried cost becomes the next decision's unstable foundation.
The question most teams don’t ask before the next initiative
Most leadership teams move from one major decision to the next without pausing to ask what they're still carrying.
The previous initiative had tradeoffs. Some were named, discussed, and genuinely absorbed. Others were acknowledged in the room and then set aside — not because anyone was careless, but because the momentum of the decision made full absorption feel unnecessary at the time. What those uncarried costs do is stay live in the system. They don't announce themselves. They surface later, quietly, as friction that makes the next initiative harder to move than it should be, as strain that shows up in functions that were never supposed to bear it, and as conversations that keep returning when the team expected to be building something new.
The next initiative doesn't launch on a clean foundation. It launches on top of everything the last decision left unresolved.
What it means for decisions already in motion
Before the next major initiative takes shape, a few questions are worth sitting with.
It's not about questioning what you are building. Your team already knows that. And it's not whether the strategy is sound. You've done that work. Those questions center on what the last major decision cost, where that cost currently lives in the organization, and whether it has been fully carried or simply moved. When those questions get answered with precision before the work begins, something shifts. The new initiative doesn't inherit the unresolved weight of the previous one. It starts clean.
That is what decision durability actually produces — not just decisions that hold, but initiatives that move.
As your team looks toward the next major initiative: what tradeoffs from your last significant decision are still moving through your system?
Until Next Sunday,
Shawnette Rochelle, MBA, PCC
Founder, Excellence Unbounded
Executive decision systems that accelerate strategic execution
If you’re curious to learn more about my work with executive teams, you can find it here.
If you want to have a conversation to learn more, schedule it here.
1 U.S. House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, Final Committee Report: The Design, Development, and Certification of the Boeing 737 MAX, September 2020.
2 Ibid.; see also Wikipedia, Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, citing the NTSB review of Boeing's functional hazard assessment assumptions, September 2019.
