The Decision Nobody Owns: Why Organisations Move Slower Than Their Plans
Change is rarely slow because the work is hard. It is slow because it stops, again and again, waiting for an answer that has no owner and no date — and nobody ever puts a price on the waiting.
Ask a leadership team why change takes so long and the answer is usually capacity. That is true, and it is rarely the main reason. In most organisations I see, the work itself does not take very long. The waiting does.
1. Most of the Elapsed Time Is Waiting
Take a piece of work that ran late and lay the calendar out end to end. Mark the days when somebody was actively doing something, and the days when it sat still.
The second number is usually the larger one. Work waits for a design authority to convene, for a budget to be confirmed, for a supplier to be chosen, for someone to say which option is preferred.
None of that shows up as delay. It shows up as a date that moved.
2. Consensus Is Not a Decision Rule
A great deal of corporate decision-making runs on agreement. The paper goes round, objections get worked through, and eventually nobody is opposed.
It is a civilised way to run an organisation. It works when the group is small and the question is genuinely shared. What it lacks is a stopping rule — there is always one more person who has not seen it yet.
Nobody said no. Nothing happened either.
3. Escalation Does Not Decide Anything
When agreement fails the item goes up — and most executives assume that is the system working as designed.
What comes back down is usually a request for more analysis — because the forum above has less context than the one below, and is being asked to choose between options it did not frame.
Two months later the same question returns, better presented, and is settled the way it would have been settled originally.
4. Decisions Drift Upwards for a Reason
This is not a failure of nerve. People send decisions upwards because the organisation has taught them to.
A manager who makes a call that turns out badly has their name against it. A manager who takes the same question to a committee has done the responsible thing, whatever the outcome. So questions travel towards the level with the most to lose from being wrong, and the least time to think.
5. Nobody Costs the Delay
A poor decision is visible. It has an author, a consequence and, usually, a lessons-learned session.
A slow one has none of those. Three weeks of waiting costs real money — people paid to be available, a supplier holding a team, a benefit landing a quarter later. It appears in no report anywhere.
Organisations measure the quality of their decisions and ignore the price of the time it takes to make them.
6. Name a Person, Not a Forum
The most useful thing an executive can do about this costs nothing. For any decision of consequence, write down four things:
- who decides, by name, rather than which board it goes to
- who genuinely needs to be consulted, and who merely wants to be
- the date it will be decided by
- what happens by default if that date passes
The last one does most of the work. A decision with a default cannot be avoided by staying quiet — which is how most of them are avoided now.
7. Decide at the Level That Carries the Consequence
The right level for a decision is the lowest one where the person can see its whole consequence.
Lower than that and you get local optimisation — a sensible choice for one team that costs another more than it saved. Higher and you get delay, plus a decision taken from a summary.
Most organisations are careful about the risk of deciding too low. Very few examine the cost of deciding too high.
8. Reversible Decisions Deserve Less of Your Time
Not every decision warrants the same care. The useful test is whether it can be undone.
A choice that can be reversed inside a month should be made quickly, by whoever is closest to it. One that cannot — a platform, an operating model, a ten-year contract — deserves the analysis and the time.
Treating both the same way produces organisations that agonise over a shortlist and sign a decade of commitment in a single meeting.
9. The Pace Is Set at the Top
None of this is fixed by governance design, and a PMO cannot do it on anyone’s behalf. It is set by how an executive team behaves when somebody makes a reasonable call that turns out badly. If that person is supported, decisions stay where they belong. If not, everything comes upstairs — and the organisation slows to the speed of its most crowded diary.
Plans are late for a fairly unremarkable reason. Not because the work was harder than expected, but because it stopped several times, waiting for an answer nobody owned.
The question worth asking is not how quickly the organisation can deliver. It is how quickly it is willing to decide.