We speak often about the need for early warning when it comes to business intelligence. Usually, after something really bad has happened, leaders say “Oh, if only we had known sooner. Let’s get more interested in early warning.” This is also accompanied by observations like, “This was a failure of imagination” and “we’ve got to think out of the box.”

I submit that most times, people don’t want to see the most important changes. Such tectonic shifts mean that precious institutions (and assumptions) might be shaken to their foundations.

For example, have you ever seen this chart of American credit card debt?

It matches housing prices perfectly, matching real economic growth for twenty years, then skyrocketing after 2001.

But these together, and you can clearly see the fundamentals of the American economy changing in a radical fashion. Something about the largest economy in human history changed dramatically, and nobody really stopped to make a comment.

If we want a prosperous sane economy and functioning government institutions, leaders have got to get serious about the deep philosophical and analytical dialogues that need to accompany these kinds of changes.

The last thing we want is to watch an even bigger catastrophe than the past month, followed by the all-too-typical chorus of “we should be interested in early warning,” and “nobody could have seen it coming.”

You can see it coming as long as you are willing to watch what’s really happening.

It’s time.