A publicly committed launch date changes what counts as evidence. Once a company has told retailers, press, and shareholders when a product ships, late-arriving risk data stops competing on its merits and starts competing against a promise the organization has already made. Barry Staw called this escalation of commitment: once a course of action becomes public, people rationalize away the feedback that contradicts it. The quiet damage is not that leaders ignore the warning but that they reclassify it — an engineering problem discovered too late to change the hardware becomes a communications problem by default, because communications is the only lever still attached.

Apple's iPhone 4 is the cleanest illustration. It went on sale June 24, 2010, and within days users found that gripping the lower-left corner, bridging the gap between two external antenna segments, could drop calls. Bloomberg reported that a senior Apple antenna engineer had raised concerns about the design with Steve Jobs before launch. On July 12 Consumer Reports declined to recommend the phone, the first time it had withheld a recommendation from an iPhone. Four days later Apple held a press conference, argued that the problem was industry-wide, and gave every buyer a free case through the end of September. Apple later put the cost of that giveaway at roughly $175 million. The antenna itself was not redesigned until the iPhone 4S arrived a year later.

The phone still sold — 1.7 million units in its first three days. That is the part leaders misread. Hitting the date was not obviously wrong; what the date bought was a problem that could only be answered with money and a press conference instead of a hardware change. The cost of a locked launch is rarely the launch itself. It is the narrowing of the response set, months before anyone notices the responses have narrowed.