Decision latency: the hidden tax on strategy execution

Remember the movie Love and Other Drugs? Jake Gyllenhaal plays a pharmaceutical sales rep at Pfizer, right when Viagra was introduced. He had spent years convincing doctors to prescribe drugs that worked more or less like the competition. And suddenly, he has the perfect product. The silver bullet. The one that doesn't need explaining, doesn't need defending. The one product that sells itself, but he's still flooded with samples for doctors to try the magic firsthand.

I've felt that sense of breakthrough many times. Walking out of product meetings with adrenaline pumping, leadership unveiling a promising new feature, the sales team buzzing. We could all see our Viagra.

Then, two or three days later, the phone would ring.

The meeting where everything was possible

We called it the Innovation Sprint. Though "sprint" was generous. It happened every few months, whenever a new product was close enough to launch.

The founder and the head of purchasing sat in the conference room. Three country managers and I dialled in, voices crackling through speakers that made everyone sound like they were broadcasting from a submarine. It didn't matter. We were on a mission. The energy was unmistakable.

The meeting was about Change-Maker, a premium line meant to reposition us in a segment where we had never stood a chance before. The name said it all. For the first time, we thought the chains might actually take us seriously.

Premium positioning. Innovative formulation. Features that no competitors could match. Yes, of course, calling the price point a reflection of value was a euphemism, but no one cared. Change-Maker was like nothing else.

On the call, you could hear the country managers doing mental calculations. Fantasising about meters and meters of shelf space in chains that had ignored us for years. Listings that would finally stick. The kind of product you don't have to push because it pulls.

People sat taller. Voices sharpened. You could almost taste the certainty.

I was part of it. We all were.

The call that changed nothing and everything

Two days later, the founder called. No formal meeting scheduled. Just a call.

"So, as we discussed," the founder said, "it turns out the supplier can't guarantee the specs we agreed on. What we can actually produce is a bit different."

What followed was a diluted version. Total vanilla. The features that had made Change-Maker a silver bullet were gone. What remained was an okay product. Respectable. Utterly unremarkable.

The supplier's fault, of course. A fact of life. Nothing to be done.

Some people on the call pushed back. Voices raised briefly, then lowered. Theatre. Everyone knew it wouldn't change anything. This wasn't the first time. It wasn't the fifth time. It was systemic.

And here's what made it expensive: the development kept going. The price point stayed the same. The sales targets stayed the same. The positioning stayed the same.

Only the product had changed.

The country managers now had to sell a generic product at a premium price, chasing targets set for a silver bullet they no longer had. And everyone knew it. But nobody said it out loud. Because saying it out loud would have required a decision: either adjust the targets, or kill the project, or admit that the original specs were never realistic.

None of those decisions got made. So the organisation moved forward, optimising for a reality that no longer existed.

I've been on both sides of that call. As head of marketing, watching packaging designs go to the flames. As sales director, recalculating which retailers might still bite.

The launch happened. We hit 20% of the original target. One fifth.

Then came the second act: fighting retailers to keep the product on shelves. Not because we had a plan to turn it around. Because maybe, if it stayed there a few more months, something would change. We had no strategy to make it change. Just hope. And hope, in business, is not a strategy. It's a symptom.

The product was quietly discontinued a year later. No post-mortem. No lessons learned. Just silence.

Someone eventually said the truth out loud. By then, it changed nothing.

And for the record, I didn't say it either. That's the point. The system trained us to stay silent.

What decision latency actually is

Most strategies don't die because they're flawed. They die because decisions arrive too late to matter.

Decision latency is the gap between when a decision should be made and when it actually is. There's a second layer that is even more dangerous: the failure to decide again when circumstances change. The original decision might have been timely. What kills you is the inability to revisit it when the premises collapse.

In the Change-Maker story, the first decision was made: launch a premium line. But when the specs changed, no one made the second decision: adjust the targets, reposition the product, or kill the project. The organisation kept executing a plan whose foundation had disappeared.

Decision latency is invisible in dashboards, untracked in KPIs, and rarely discussed in strategy reviews. But it's eating your margins, exhausting your people, and slowly teaching your best employees that initiative is pointless.

The symptoms hide behind reasonable language:

"We need more alignment."
"Let's socialise this with stakeholders."
"Can we get a few more people in the room?"

These phrases sound responsible. Collaborative, even. But often they're doing something else entirely. They're transferring risk. When someone asks for more alignment, they often mean: "I don't want to be the one who made this call if it goes wrong."

Why smart organisations decide slowly

The irony is that decision latency is often worse in sophisticated organisations. Places with experienced leaders, mature governance, and clear escalation paths. The very structures designed to enable good decisions end up preventing any decision from being made in time.

Three dynamics drive this.

The first is alignment as insurance. In most organisations, being wrong is career-damaging. Being part of a group that was wrong is merely unfortunate. So decisions get pushed into committees, expanded to include more stakeholders, and delayed until everyone has weighed in. The decision doesn't get better. It gets safer for the individuals involved.

The second is governance as ritual. Steering committees, review boards, approval chains. These exist for legitimate reasons. But over time, many stop governing and start performing. Meetings happen because they're scheduled. Approvals are given because the process requires them. Nobody asks whether the meeting changed anything. The ritual continues because stopping it would require a decision nobody wants to make.

The third is asymmetric accountability. The cost of making a wrong decision is visible, immediate, and personally attributable. The cost of not making a decision is diffuse, delayed, and shared across the system. No individual gets blamed for the opportunity that was never pursued. No performance review mentions the market that was lost while waiting for consensus. So the rational move, for each individual, is to delay.

Why frameworks often fail in founder-led companies

At this point, a consultant would pull out a decision rights matrix. A RACI chart. An SLA for decisions.

I've seen RACI charts pinned to walls in companies where everyone knew the founder would override any decision. The chart was a decoration. The power was elsewhere.

These tools aren't useless. They work in organisations where decision rights are stable, and enforcement is in place. But in founder-led companies, informal power isn't a bug. It's the architecture. The founder has the power. No framework changes that. Nor should it.

Let's be clear: founders should have the final word. The responsibility for the company sits on their shoulders. The problem isn't that founders decide. The problem is when decisions stay implicit or keep shifting without being restated clearly enough for others to execute.

The bottleneck is rarely a missing framework. It's a missing moment of explicitness.

What actually works

The theoretical solution exists, of course. In some companies, the best fix is a counterweight: a trusted operator who can restate decisions, surface contradictions, and insist on revisiting choices when assumptions change. Call it a decision editor, a translator, an accountability partner. The label matters less than the permission.

It can work. I've seen it work. But it requires something rare: a founder willing to be held accountable by someone they've chosen, and a translator willing to speak uncomfortable truths without becoming a yes-man or getting devoured at the first "actually, you said something different last time." That kind of trust is possible, just uncommon. And it can’t be installed by a framework. It’s built over time, one hard conversation at a time.

But there's something simpler that doesn't require finding the perfect counterweight.

I've met founders who had this clarity. They knew what they were protecting. They knew what they would sacrifice. When the pressure came, there was nothing to decide.

One I heard about walked away from a deal that would have tripled his revenue in six months. Every year, the largest online retailer in his market came calling. Every year, he listened to their terms, explained his, and stood up and left. The discount structure they wanted would have destroyed his specialist retailers. So he said no. Every year. Same meeting. Same outcome. No ambiguity.

The difference between that founder and the one in the Change-Maker story wasn't courage. It was preparation. He had made the trade-off explicit before the pressure arrived. He knew what he was willing to bleed for.

The paradox we all live

Here's what's strange. Every good negotiator knows you define your walk-away price before you enter the room. Every sales manager knows at what discount you stand up and leave. We do this exercise for deals worth fifty thousand euros.

We don't do it for product launches that will define the company's positioning for the next three years.

Why?

Because small decisions have immediate, contained consequences. You lose that client, you know exactly what you lost. Big decisions have diffuse, delayed consequences. If you cancel the launch, what do you lose? Revenue, yes. But also morale. Credibility. Momentum. Things you can't quantify. And what you can't quantify, you avoid confronting.

So we prepare rigorously for negotiations that matter little, and we wing it for decisions that matter enormously. We write down our BATNA for a supplier contract, but we never write down: "If the specs change, we kill the project. If the specs change but we proceed anyway, we cut the price by 20% and halve the sales targets."

The Change-Maker disaster wasn't inevitable. It would have taken one sentence, spoken before the first meeting: "If the supplier can't deliver the specs, what do we do?" Nobody asked. So when the moment came, nobody knew. This is what happens when a plan pretends to be a strategy.

The Monday morning nugget

Before your first meeting this week, write down the one decision you've been avoiding. Not postponing for lack of data. Avoiding because you don't know who decides, or what you'd have to sacrifice, or what happens if you're wrong.

Make it explicit. Write down:

• What's the decision?
• Who makes the final call?
• By when?
• What do we give up if we say yes?
• What do we give up if we say no?
• What assumption would force us to decide again?

Do for one strategic decision what you already do for every negotiation. Define the walk-away before you enter the room.

The price of silence

The most expensive moment in the Change-Maker story wasn't the meeting. It wasn't even the phone call.

It was the silence after.

Everyone on that call knew the product had changed. Everyone knew the targets no longer made sense. Everyone knew we were about to spend months optimising for a reality that no longer existed.

Nobody said it.

Not because we were cowards. Because saying it would have required a decision. And decisions, in that organisation, were someone else's job.

Decision latency doesn't announce itself. It doesn't look like dysfunction. It looks like prudence. It lives in the pause before someone speaks. In the email that gets drafted but is not sent. In the meeting that ends with "let's revisit this next quarter."

The market doesn't wait for next quarter. The competitor doesn't wait for alignment. The opportunity doesn't care about your governance process.

Strategy isn't a document. It's the sum of decisions made and not made, explicit and avoided, owned and orphaned.

Every decision you don't make is still a decision. You're just letting the system make it for you.

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