Decision debt. Debt that slows down companies more than the market
In organisations there is constant talk of speed, innovation, adaptability. The need for better decision-making is rightly felt. Therefore, investments are made in data, dashboards, artificial intelligence, predictive models. Yet, despite the increasing amount of available information and tools, many companies remain slow and time-to-market is getting longer. Why? Well, we usually answer that organisations are complex. True. But are we sure that the point is just to have all the information needed to make better decisions?
Often the problem is not how much information is missing to make better decisions. It is how many past decisions continue to govern the present. Organisations accumulate unfinished, stratified, outdated decisions. Processes created for other markets, rules introduced for emergencies that no longer exist, roles defined for structures that have changed in the meantime, processes articulated for needs that no one remembers anymore. Every decision that is not disposed of remains active like a line of code that no one dares to touch any more. It continues to produce effects, constraints, obligatory paths. It is what we can call decision debt: an organisational debt that cannot be seen in budgets but is paid every day in slowness, friction, duplication, micro-conflicts and sub-optimal choices.
Decision debt is not born from error, it is born from inertia: a real organisational passivity that affects productivity, quality of choices and time-to-market. Decision debt is generated by the accumulation of unfinished, stratified or outdated decisions that continue to govern organisations, slowing them down from within. It is an invisible cost that produces structural slowdowns, de-empowerment, lateral conflicts and multiplication of decision-making fora.
The effects are concrete. Projects requiring more levels of approval than necessary. Meetings convened to align on choices already implicitly made. Competent people blocked by rules that no one knows how to change. Teams producing ever more refined analyses to circumvent decisions that are never called into question. In this scenario, increasing information does not reduce uncertainty: it amplifies it. Each new decision has to negotiate with all the previous ones that have never been eliminated. Thus the past continues to decide for the present, even when the context has radically changed, becoming an invisible infrastructure.
A profound redefinition of leadership is at stake here. In fact, from this perspective, leadership is not only the ability to make decisions, but above all the ability to divest decisions, cleaning up the system to restore its speed, clarity and operational intelligence. Not only the ability to choose, but the ability to divest. Not just introducing new directions, but ridding the organisation of those no longer needed. Disposing of old decisions is as much an act of managerial responsibility as taking new ones. It requires courage, because it touches power structures, professional identities, established rituals. It requires method, because it is not a matter of 'cleaning up' indiscriminately, but of distinguishing what is needed from what stiffens.
