I wanted better Wi-Fi. I hadn’t considered foreign policy

I was looking at buying a Starlink for my travels. My current apartment’s Wi-Fi is unreliable, hotspotting is only moderately better and I wanted something portable that would let me work without organising my day around somebody else’s router.

I was considering the usual things. Cost and weight. Would it work in every country I planned to visit. Whether I could put it on a balcony.

Then I read reports about restrictions affecting Ukraine’s Starlink satellite communications, including military services. The circumstances are vastly different from mine. But they interrupted my shopping with a thought.

Whose decisions would my new independence depend on?

I had imagined a pleasingly simple arrangement that would release me from an annoying issue giving me a sense of freedom.

I hadn’t thought that there could be dependencies. I have little visibility into the chain of commercial agreements, permissions and decisions that allows a satellite connection to reach me. The simplicity of using something can lead to a much larger assumption: that its availability is equally straightforward.

For an organisation, when a service works reliably, operations build around it. It can affect hiring, locations, promises to customers, and then retiring older systems. Each decision increases what depends on the service continuing to be available. The organisation may have disaster recovery plans, but do those plans cover a provider being unable or no longer permitted to supply it?

And the provider need not have done anything wrong. It may be operating responsibly within obligations of its own. Governments have responsibilities. Companies have contracts, jurisdictions and limits. Those arrangements can all be reasonable while leaving the customer exposed to a decision they cannot influence.

Which makes me wonder how often we count the benefits of a new capability without understanding the choices we could potentially be giving up.

None of this makes Starlink a bad purchase and it may still solve my problem. What changed was my understanding of the purchase. I was buying greater freedom to choose where I worked, within arrangements I did not control.

For leaders making much larger decisions, this question is critical. A technology can expand what an organisation is able to do while leaving someone else with considerable authority over whether it can continue doing it.

We tend to notice the expanded capability first. We build plans around it. We may only discover who has the final say when we want to do something that now isn’t possible.