Pricing the cost of slow decisions: a repeatable measure of organisational latency.
Every executive team knows it decides too slowly, and almost none can say by how much, where, or at what cost. Without a number, latency stays a culture complaint — discussed annually, priced never, fixed nowhere.
The index makes latency observable. It reads the interval from decision-necessary to decision-communicated out of calendars, approval trails and minutes — no interviews, no self-assessment — and prices the delay against the value case of the work each decision was holding up. The output is a cost line a CFO will accept, produced in under a week.
The last sixty significant decisions are traced through calendars, approval chains and minutes. Necessity date and communication date are logged for each.
Day 1–2Decisions are classified by type and owner structure — single-owner, shared, unowned. Latency distributions are computed per class.
Day 3Each delay is priced against the value case of the delayed work, discounted for attribution. The index is the annualised total; the class table shows where it lives.
Day 4–5The index is published in full and may be applied without licence. Measurement definitions are documented in MKM-R-2026-011, chapter 1.
As the baseline measurement before installing the Operating Cadence Model or the Decision Rights Ledger — and the proof afterwards.
Transformation diagnostics, where decision latency is a leading indicator of programme slippage.
Annual governance reviews, to track whether the operating rhythm is holding as the organisation grows.
Applied across the 40-organisation latency sample and in every cadence engagement since 2024:
The Institute stewards the index and revises it after every tenth application review; pricing rules are re-based annually.
Cite as: Markham Institute, “Decision Velocity Index”, MKM-F-007, v1.3 (2026).