Companies that cannot decide anything are rarely full of indecisive people. Usually nobody is certain who is allowed to decide, which looks identical from the outside and is much easier to fix.
A company that cannot decide anything is rarely full of indecisive people. It is usually full of people who are not certain they are allowed.
The description is almost always the same. A decision comes up, it gets discussed, and then it comes up again a month later in a different meeting with mostly the same people. Nobody blocked it. Nobody disagreed, exactly. It simply never got made, and by the time it does the conditions have moved and it has to be reopened anyway.
Leaders tend to read this as a culture problem, or as a people problem, and reach for something that addresses confidence or accountability. Both of those can be real. But the first thing worth checking is far more boring, and far easier to fix.
Take a decision the company has genuinely been slow on. Ask three people, separately, who is supposed to make it. In a company with a decision-rights problem you get three different answers, and often a fourth that is some version of "I think we agree it together."
That last answer is the expensive one. A decision that belongs to a group belongs to nobody in particular, so nobody carries it, and the way it reaches the surface is as another meeting. Nothing in the org chart is wrong. The chart says who reports to whom, which is a different question from who is allowed to commit the company to something.
The second place to look is the calendar. Most recurring meetings in a slow company exist to tell people things, and the telling could be a document. A meeting earns its place when a decision gets made in it, by someone who is in the room and allowed to make it.
Counting is usually enough to make the point. Over a month, take the standing meetings and mark each one as deciding or reporting. The ratio is normally worse than anyone expected, and it is a number that leaders act on, because the cost is in hours they can see.
From the outside, a company where nobody is sure who decides behaves exactly like a company full of cautious people. Recommendations go up and come back with questions. Work gets redone to answer an objection that was never actually raised. People start socializing a decision before proposing it, which takes weeks and is entirely rational given they do not know whose agreement they need.
Treating that as a confidence problem produces training that does not help, because the behavior was a reasonable response to genuine ambiguity. Remove the ambiguity and most of it goes away without anyone being asked to be braver.
The useful output is short. A list of the decisions that actually matter, a named person against each one, and what they owe other people before and after they decide. Short enough that somebody reads it rather than files it, and specific enough that a disagreement about who decides becomes a disagreement about a line on a page.
It will be wrong in places, which is fine and faster to discover than to prevent. The test is not whether the document is elegant. It is whether, three months later, the decision that used to come up every month comes up once.
How we work on this with companies, if the description sounds familiar.
Tell us what is happening. We’ll tell you whether we can help, and say so plainly if we cannot.
Most of what we do starts with one sentence about something that is not working. You do not need a brief.
Start A Conversation