Decision latency — the gap between when a decision needs to be made and when it actually gets made — is one of the most expensive things in a mid-sized company, and one of the least measured. It shows up as missed windows, delayed launches, and the quiet frustration of talented people who can't move forward because they're waiting for a green light.
The common assumption is that slow decisions reflect unclear strategy: if leadership knew where they were going, decisions would be faster. In practice, we rarely find this to be true. Most slow decisions are slow not because of strategic ambiguity but because of structural ambiguity — nobody is quite sure who is authorized to make the call, so it floats until someone senior enough to stop worrying about the consequences finally decides.
The fix is rarely a new strategy. It's a clearer decision architecture: a documented map of which decisions happen at which level, what information is needed before they can be made, and who owns the outcome. This sounds obvious, and most leadership teams assume they already have it. They usually don't, or they have a version of it that exists on paper and gets ignored in practice.
One test we use: take the last five decisions that took longer than two weeks. For each one, ask whether the delay was caused by missing information or by uncertainty about who had the authority to decide. If the answer is consistently the latter, you have a structure problem, not a strategy problem.