Decision velocity is a balance-sheet item
Inventory has a carrying cost and every CFO can quote it. Undecided decisions carry cost the same way — the median organisation we measured pays $6.8M a year for the queue — and almost no CFO has ever seen the number.
When a decision waits, everything behind it waits too: the capital it would release, the hire it would approve, the price change it would set. That waiting has a price, exactly as warehoused stock does. Across 40 organisations we traced the last sixty significant decisions each had made — from the moment the decision became necessary to the moment it was communicated — and priced the delay against the value case of the work each decision was holding up.
The result is a distribution nobody enjoys seeing their position on. The median organisation held nine working weeks a year of decision queue, priced at $6.8M in delayed value and rework. The slowest quartile held more than twice that. And the variable that best predicted speed was not industry, size or management fashion — it was whether the decision had a single named owner.
The anatomy of the queue
Slowness is not evenly distributed. Single-owner decisions in the sample moved in a median 4 days; cross-functional decisions took 34. The difference is not analytical difficulty — many of the slow decisions were analytically trivial. It is that a decision without one owner must build consensus as it travels, and consensus-building is the most expensive transport a decision can take.
Strikingly, 71% of measured latency was attributable to missing authority rather than missing information. The organisations were not waiting to know more. They were waiting for someone to be allowed to decide.
Putting it on the balance sheet
Treating latency as a cost line changes behaviour in a way that exhortations to “be more decisive” never do. Once the queue is priced, it competes for management attention like any other cost — and the repairs are unglamorous and effective: one named owner per recurring decision class, a fixed forum with the authority to decide, and a quarterly re-measurement to stop the queue growing back.
The measurement takes under a week and is published as a public instrument. The only real barrier is that the number, once seen, cannot be unseen — which is, of course, the point.
Cite as: Markham Institute, “Decision velocity is a balance-sheet item”, Markham Perspectives, May 2026. Republication permitted with attribution.
The Execution Notes are written by the Markham Institute from engagement evidence, reviewed before publication. Positions are argued, priced, and open to challenge.
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