Time & Perspective Quote by Norman Ralph Augustine

Augustine’s line lands like an engineering postmortem disguised as a proverb: the real failure isn’t that answers are hard, it’s that organizations are slow at wanting them. The sentence builds a neat little tragedy of timing. First, the “people asking the questions” aren’t villains; they’re simply late to their own curiosity. By the time they’re “ready,” the machinery of work has moved on. Then comes the sharper twist: the “people doing the work” haven’t just forgotten the answers, they’ve “lost track of the questions.” That’s not ignorance; it’s drift. Process has replaced purpose.

The subtext is a critique of bureaucratic latency, especially in technical or large-scale systems where feedback loops are long and accountability is distributed. Questions get asked for show, to satisfy governance rituals, or to create the appearance of control. Meanwhile, the workers adapt to deadlines, shifting priorities, and the constant churn of deliverables. The result is institutional amnesia: not a lack of data, but a loss of narrative. Without a stable question, “the answer” becomes a report, a slide deck, a metric - something that can be filed rather than acted on.

Context matters: Augustine is best known for “Augustine’s laws” and for a career steeped in aerospace and defense - domains where complexity, cost, and time scales practically manufacture this mismatch. His intent is managerial and cultural: shorten the loop, keep the question alive, and treat inquiry as continuous, not ceremonial. The wit is dry, but the warning is blunt: when curiosity arrives late, even competence can’t save you from irrelevance.