A lagging indicator tells you what already happened. Revenue, delivery dates, incident counts: by the time they move, the cause is weeks or months in the past. The Four A's are leading indicators. They move before the results do, which is what makes them worth watching.
The gap between cause and effect
Conditions are the cause; outcomes are the effect, and there is always a lag between them. Attention fragments this month; the missed deadline arrives next quarter. Authority centralizes now; decision velocity collapses later. If you only watch outcomes, you are always reacting to a cause you can no longer change. Watching conditions closes that gap.
Read the drift, not just the level
A leading signal is most useful as a trend. A single Readiness Score is a snapshot; the change between scores is the intelligence. A condition sliding from strong to adequate is a warning worth acting on even while the outcomes still look fine, because the outcomes are the last thing to move.
Act on the early signal
The point of a leading indicator is to act before the result is set. When a condition starts to slip, the cheap intervention is available now and the expensive one arrives later. Mission Intelligence exists to buy that lead time and to make leaders trust it enough to spend it.
Leading signals compound into a trend line. The next lesson tracks the flagship condition metric across cycles.
How this fits the system
Read this way, the Readiness Score becomes a leading indicator that moves before results do.