Your decision making approach costs more than you think
by Tony Fifoot, ~3 mins reading time
This is the first in a 4 part series, or maybe a 5 part series. Let’s decide a bit later.
Across almost every organisation I’ve worked with, when something isn’t moving fast enough, people look at the work. They interrogate the individual performance, the plans, the roadmap, the tools. They normally don’t look at how decisions are made.
Decisions are the thing behind all the other things. Every strategy you execute, every initiative you fund, every direction you set, all start with a decision, and if your decision-making process is broken, everything downstream pays the price.
In fast-moving environments: product development, operationalising strategy, building a new capability, slow decisions aren’t just frustrating, they’re expensive. Every week a significant decision sits unresolved is a week of delayed ROI, a week of wasted spend, a week of your team operating without clear direction. The market doesn’t pause while you’re still aligning.
The problem gets worse as the decision gets bigger.
Big decisions are like magnets, attracting big groups of people. More stakeholders means more people to brief, more context to share, more perspectives to reconcile. The batch size of the decision grows, and if you’ve read Don Reinertsen’s work on flow and batch size in product development, you’ll know what happens next: larger batches create queues, slower feedback, higher costs, and urgency builds. By the time you’ve finally gathered everyone, run the workshops, and circulated the deck, the context you made the decision in has already shifted. You’re solving yesterday’s problem with more pressure and anxiety.
More information will help won’t it…
The instinct in complex situations is to gather more information before deciding. More analysis, more data, more review cycles. It feels responsible. But in complex environments, certainty doesn’t come from more preparation, it comes from action and feedback. You learn by doing, not by analysing. The longer you wait for certainty that will never fully arrive, the more you’ve already paid in opportunity cost.
There’s also a quality problem hiding inside slow decisions.
When a decision drags out, involving too many people (often without a clear process), it rarely ends up reflecting the best collective thinking in the room. It’s normally the most senior voice, or the loudest shouting person. The people closest to the actual work, the ones who understand the detail and the implications, get progressively marginalised as the decision escalates. You end up with a slower decision that’s also a worse one.
“How an organisation meets and makes decisions is one of the clearest indicators of its culture, and also how well things actually get done.”
The culture signal.
Every decision your organisation makes sends a message about how things actually work here. Who gets heard. Whether it’s safe to move without sign-off from the top. Whether raising a concern will help or just delay things. Over time, these patterns calcify into norms, and norms become culture. A broken decision-making process doesn’t just slow you down, it shapes the kind of organisation you become.
Most organisations never consciously choose how they make decisions. They inherit a default and that default tends to swing between two broken extremes depending on how much pressure they’re under. Neither extreme reliably produces good outcomes. Both have real costs.
The good news is that decision-making is a design problem. You can build a better process, one that’s faster and produces better outcomes, without leaving the right people out. It doesn’t require a restructure or a culture program. It requires a different approach to the moment when a decision needs to be made.
That’s what this series is about.
Tomorrow in Part 2: I’ll map the four main ways decisions actually get made in most organisations, and explain why two of them are causing most of the dysfunction. If you’ve ever wondered why decisions seem to escalate every time, or just take forever, that’s where we’ll start.