Glossary
Late intervention
Late intervention is acting on a frustration cluster after the team has already adapted around it. The fix still works structurally, but the credibility cost is much higher because the team has already been taught that effort spent raising the issue did not produce progress.
Late intervention names the most common operating-partner mistake: waiting until the year-three engagement survey to act on a frustration cluster the team named in the first six months. The intervention itself is rarely the hard part; the hard part is that the team no longer believes the intervention will hold.
The framework treats late intervention as structurally cheaper than no intervention but credibility-wise far more expensive than early intervention. The team has spent a year or more building informal workarounds, and the workarounds are now part of how work gets done.
The doors and recipes are the same. What is different is the message back to the team, which has to acknowledge the lateness explicitly — otherwise it lands as another announcement the team has learned not to invest in.
How it is measured
- Time-to-decision: median days between a cluster reaching threshold confidence and a Three Doors decision being recorded against it.
- Late-intervention rate: share of decisions recorded more than 90 days after the cluster first reached threshold.
Dr. Tim Hough · ISBN 979-8-9965397-1-0 · Buy the book →