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 sitting 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. The range is wide because attribution is genuinely hard. A delayed decision rarely costs nothing and it rarely costs everything, so we publish the spread instead of settling on one confident figure taken from somewhere in the middle of that range.

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. What the method cannot do is tell you whether the decision was any good. It times the queue, not the judgement. The instrument was built so a client can run it without us, and that constraint is also why it stops at the queue, because judging the quality of a decision would need interviews and interviews are where this sort of measurement usually falls apart. 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.