The cost of a late decision

Delay is rarely recorded as a cost. It appears instead as a slower quarter, a missed hiring window, a competitor who moved first. Because no line item carries its name, delay is tolerated in organisations that would never tolerate the equivalent write-off.

In our experience the decisions that stall are not the difficult ones. They are the ones with no agreed owner and no agreed evidence standard. The moment those two things exist, most decisions resolve in a single sitting.

A useful discipline is to log, for every material decision, the date the question was first raised and the date it was answered. The distribution of that gap tells a leadership team more about its operating model than any engagement survey.

The remedy is unglamorous: name the decider, define what evidence would be sufficient, set the date. Sufficiency is the hard part — teams often gather more information than the decision can absorb, then decide on instinct anyway.

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