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. It gets 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, with no interviews and no self-assessment, then prices each delay against the value case of the work that decision was holding up. The output is a cost line a CFO will accept, produced in under a week. What the index cannot read is the decision nobody ever put on a calendar, so it understates latency in organisations that avoid decisions rather than delay them.
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 by owner structure, which is single-owner, shared or unowned. Latency distributions are then 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, and 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. The trace needs read access to calendars and approval systems from the first day, which is the piece that takes longest to arrange inside a large organisation. Where that access is refused, we do not run the index on interviews instead.
As the baseline measurement before installing the Operating Cadence Model or the Decision Rights Ledger, and as 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. A sample of that size is enough to show the pattern across mid-market firms and not enough to say anything reliable about a single sector:
The Institute stewards the index and revises it after every tenth application review, pricing rules are re-based annually, and the attribution discount has been tightened since first publication, which makes any figure produced under the current edition more conservative than the earliest ones.
Cite as: Markham Institute, “Decision Velocity Index”, MKM-F-007, v1.3 (2026).