The cost of the slow decision

Slow decisions are not a culture problem. They are an unpriced cost line.

Across 40 organisations we timed the same thing: the interval between a decision becoming necessary and the decision being made and communicated. The median organisation loses nine working weeks a year to decisions waiting in queues — not being analysed, not being debated, simply waiting for a forum with the authority to decide. At mid-market scale that latency prices out between $2M and $14M a year in delayed value, stalled programmes and repeated work.

This brief publishes the measurement method in full. Latency is observable: it can be read out of calendars, approval trails and steering-committee minutes without a single interview. The brief walks through the four highest-cost decision classes, shows the latency distribution across the sample, and prices a worked example so a reader can run the same arithmetic on their own organisation in under a week.