Why Smart Organizations Still Make Slow Decisions

For a long time, I thought most organizational problems were execution problems: Projects were delayed because teams weren't aligned. Roadmaps slipped because requirements weren't clear. Customers were frustrated because delivery wasn't moving fast enough.

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Like many people working in Product and Operations, I spent years focusing on execution. Better processes. Better planning. Better documentation. Better communication. And while those things certainly matter, I've slowly come to a different conclusion.

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Most organizations struggle because they haven't created enough clarity around decisions, not because they can't execute.

 

The symptoms show up in execution because that's where we feel them. Missed deadlines. Conflicting priorities. Escalations. Frustrated teams. Customer impact.

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But I've become increasingly convinced that the actual problem often begins much earlier. It begins when decisions are unclear, ownership is assumed rather than defined, and different parts of the organization are solving different problems without realizing it. One pattern I've noticed repeatedly is that ambiguity rarely stays where it starts. It moves: A strategic question that isn't fully resolved gets pushed into Product. A product decision that isn't fully resolved gets pushed into Engineering. An operational constraint gets worked around instead of addressed. Eventually everyone is working harder to compensate for uncertainty that nobody explicitly owns.

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This is often where Product becomes the organizational catch-all. Not because Product owns every problem. But because unresolved questions need somewhere to go. The more organizations grow, the more expensive this becomes.

What makes this particularly difficult to diagnose is that the behaviors causing friction were often the same behaviors that contributed to the organization's success. In the early stages, ambiguity can feel like an advantage: Talented people compensate. They fill in gaps. They have hallway conversations. They make judgment calls. They rely on relationships, trust, and institutional knowledge to keep work moving.

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Decisions happen quickly because the people involved share context. They know the history. They understand the tradeoffs. They can walk across the room, ask a question, and get an answer. In many ways, these behaviors become part of the company's success story. The organization grows because people are resourceful. The team succeeds because they're adaptable. The culture values flexibility over structure.For a while, it works. Then complexity increases: More customers create more exceptions. More teams create more dependencies. More stakeholders create more competing priorities. More growth creates more distance between the people making decisions and the people executing them.

Then the very behaviors that once created speed begin creating friction.

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The hallway conversation doesn't scale. The unwritten rule isn't visible to the new employee. The judgment call made by one team conflicts with the judgment call made by another. The trusted relationship that resolved ambiguity no longer exists across multiple functions. What once felt like agility starts looking like inconsistency. What once felt like flexibility starts looking like confusion. What once felt like empowerment starts looking like unclear ownership.

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It reminds me of a theme Marshall Goldsmith explores in What Got You Here Won't Get You There. The behaviors that create success at one stage often become constraints at the next. I think organizations experience the same phenomenon. The decision-making model that helped a company grow from ten people to fifty often struggles when that same company reaches one hundred, two hundred, or five hundred. Not because the people became less capable. Because the environment changed. Yet many organizations misdiagnose the problem. They conclude they need better accountability, or clearer ownership, or more process, and sometimes that's true.

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But more often than not the deeper issue is that the organization has outgrown the informal decision-making system that made it successful in the first place. The business is still operating on assumptions, relationships, and institutional knowledge while its complexity now requires explicit decision rights, escalation paths, and ownership boundaries. 

The challenge isn't replacing entrepreneurial behavior with bureaucracy and politics, it’s replacing implicit clarity with explicit clarity. Because eventually growth creates a point where people can no longer rely on knowing the right person. They need to know the right owner. The right escalation path. And the right altitude for the decision. That's often the moment organizations discover they never had an ownership problem at all.

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They had a maturity problem.

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For years, I thought this was primarily an ownership problem. I've changed my mind about that too. I think it's often an altitude problem. One of the most interesting observations from the last few years is how often people appear to be discussing the same issue while actually operating at entirely different levels of the organization.

Leadership is discussing business outcomes. Product is discussing scope and tradeoffs. Engineering is discussing implementation. Operations is discussing customer impact. Everyone leaves the meeting feeling like alignment was achieved. Then execution begins and confusion emerges. Not because people disagreed. Because they were answering different questions.

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I've sat in meetings where a conversation began with a strategic question about business direction and within ten minutes had turned into a discussion about implementation details. Nobody intentionally changed the subject. Nobody was being difficult. The altitude simply shifted. And once the altitude shifts without being recognized, ownership becomes incredibly difficult to define. Who owns the decision depends entirely on what exact decision is actually being discussed.

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That's why I've become less interested in asking: "Who owns this?" And much more interested in asking:

"At what altitude does this decision belong?"

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