Supply chains determine the speed of change

Logistics is not just about transportation and warehouses. In a complex system, there are information, financial, resource, organizational, and other flows.

Any decision goes through a chain of transformations: information must reach the right person, the decision must receive resources, resources must turn into action, and the result must return to the system as feedback.

The more nodes there are, the more delays, distortions, local interests, and coordination costs occur.

Therefore, a company's technological speed is often determined not by the speed of writing code, but by the length of its decision-making supply chain.

This is especially important at the frontier, where value is created by the number of fast verification cycles. A system capable of going through idea → experiment → conclusion in a day can outperform a system with the best specialists if the second system takes several months for the same cycle.

A futurist must see these chains as a whole, because they often hide the real limitation to change.