Organisations measure the cost of wrong decisions obsessively and the cost of late ones not at all. Here is how to put a number on the second one.
Every organisation I work with can tell me, in detail, what their last bad decision cost.
They have the incident review. They have the variance. Somebody prepared a slide.
Ask the same organisation what their last late decision cost and the room goes quiet.
The invoice nobody sends
A wrong decision arrives with a receipt attached. Somebody has to explain it, so somebody counts it.
A late decision arrives as nothing at all. The supplier stays on the old contract. The vacancy stays open. The escalation path stays the way it was. Every one of those has a weekly price, and no system in the building is set up to add it up.
That asymmetry does not make organisations careful. It makes them slow, and confident that being slow is the careful option.
Name the clock
The first move is arithmetic, not courage.
Take the decision that is currently sitting. Ask three questions.
- How long has it been open, in days, not in meetings?
- What does a week of it cost, in the unit this organisation already tracks?
- Who is carrying it while it waits?
The unit matters. In a hospital it was bed hours and agency shifts. In a distribution business it is trailer movements. In an engineering firm it is billable weeks. Do not invent a new measure for this. Use the one the finance team already reports, because the number has to survive contact with people who did not attend your session.
What usually happens next
The first number people produce is wrong, and it does not matter.
A room that has never costed a delay will overshoot or undershoot badly on the first attempt. What changes is not the accuracy. What changes is that the delay now has a size, and a decision with a size can be compared to something.
I have watched an executive team discover that a hiring approval they had treated as prudent was costing more per week than the salary they were being prudent about.
Nobody argued after that. They did not need a speech about courage. They needed the number.
The part that is uncomfortable
Naming the clock takes the cover away.
While a decision is undated and uncosted, deferring it looks like diligence. Once it has a weekly price, deferring it is a choice somebody is making, and that person now has a name.
That is the intended effect. It is also why this move belongs first, before anything about confidence thresholds. People will not decide faster because they were told to be brave. They will decide faster when waiting stops being free.
Start with one decision. Name its clock this week.
