A practical method for costing delay in the unit your organisation already tracks, and what to do with the number once you have it.
A decision deferred to the next meeting is a decision made anyway. The only thing the deferral changes is who is accountable for it, which is now nobody.
This is the move I teach first, because it is the only one that works without permission.
Pick the unit before you pick the number
The unit is the whole trick.
If you cost a delay in dollars in an organisation that runs on hours, the number will be argued with. If you cost it in the measure that already appears in the monthly report, it gets accepted, because accepting it does not require accepting anything new.
Health systems have bed hours, agency shifts and time to treatment. Logistics has trailer movements and dwell time. Utilities have outage minutes. Manufacturing has line hours. Engineering has billable weeks.
Every one of those has an established price per unit somewhere in the building. Find it. Do not build a new one.
Write it as a weekly rate
Total cost is easy to dismiss because it sounds like an argument. A weekly rate is harder to dismiss because it keeps running while you dismiss it.
"This has cost us four hundred thousand" invites a debate about assumptions.
"This costs us thirty-one thousand a week, and it is week eleven" invites a decision.
Then say it out loud, in the room
The number does nothing on a slide.
It works when somebody says it in the meeting where the decision is being deferred again, before the deferral happens, with the person who would own the decision sitting there.
I am not asking anyone to be confrontational about this. The sentence is flat and factual: "Before we push this to next month, we are agreeing to about thirty-one thousand a week for four more weeks. I want that on the record rather than in the background."
That is the whole intervention. Most rooms decide on the spot.
What it does not do
Naming the clock does not tell you which way to decide, and it does not tell you whether the decision is safe to make quickly.
That is the next move, and it is the one that keeps this method honest: sort by reversibility, not by size.
