Everyone on the team knew how to make the decision. They just weren’t making it.

I’ve been running Outcomes Over Hours for nearly seven years. In that time, slow decision-making has been a steady feature of corporate life, the kind of problem people accept as background noise.

Something has changed in the last twelve months though. And in the last three, it’s gone up like a rocket.

When I ask a tech leader what their biggest challenges are right now, decision-making is in the top few almost every time. I’d say it comes up in nine of every ten conversations I’m having. It has moved from a background gripe to a thing that’s significantly slowing teams down.

Here’s why I think it’s spiking now:

Everything is moving faster than it used to. BAU is relentless. Transformation sits on top of it. AI sits on top of that. And in the rush, people aren’t taking the time to think through how decisions should actually get made on the things that aren’t routine.

That last part is the crux.

BAU decisions typically run themselves. People know who calls what, and the machine ticks over.

The decisions that stall are the other kind. The changes. The non-BAU calls where the path isn’t obvious and the consequences are real.

Those are exactly the decisions that need a bit of design, and they’re the ones teams are skipping past.

Because change is hard.

People get their noses out of joint when they aren’t included or consulted. So the instinct, especially for a leader who cares about their people, is to consult everyone.

And that’s the trap.

If you consult everyone on everything, you grind to a halt. You end up with a team that feels heard and a decision that never gets made.

The way through is an uncomfortable conversation. Being clear, up front, about who gets consulted, who gets informed, and who actually decides. Those are three different roles, and blurring them is what kills the speed.

There are good tools for designing decision making.

RACI is one many teams know.

I personally prefer using RAPID, and particularly one question at the heart of it.

“Who has the D?”

i.e. who is the ultimate decision-maker?

Not who was in the room.

Not who had a view.

Who, in the end, makes the call so the thing can move.

When a team can answer that cleanly for the decisions that matter, the log-jam clears.

People still get consulted, their input still shapes the outcome, but the decision no longer waits for a committee to reach a consensus that was never coming.

I was working with a leadership team recently where decision-making was one of their sharpest pain points.

Here’s the thing: they already knew RACI. They’d used it before. Every person in the room could have explained it to you.

Knowing what to do and actually doing it turned out to be two completely different things.

They’d run a RACI design exercise once, a couple of years earlier, and then let it lapse. The framework was taught to the team and sat in a slide deck somewhere.

But it wasn’t ingrained in how they worked.

This is the pattern I see again and again with decision-making.

It’s rarely a knowledge gap. Most leadership teams know the tools exist. What’s missing is the operational discipline to actually put the system in and keep using it.

The fix was never a shiny new toy.

It was the discipline to do the unglamorous thing they already knew how to do, and to keep doing it.

With BAU, transformation and AI all landing at once, the volume of genuine decisions is only going up.

The teams that move fast won’t be the ones with the cleverest framework.

They’ll be the ones with the discipline to name who decides, have the uncomfortable conversation about who’s consulted, and keep that discipline in their regular operating rhythms.

So for the decisions that matter most in your world right now, start with the simple question. Does everyone know, and can live with, who has the D?

If the answer isn’t clear, it’s a conversation worth having this week.

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Tina Paterson is the founder of Outcomes Over Hours. She partners with tech leaders and their leadership teams to deliver the right outcomes faster and easier.

How I make this article

You might be wondering whether I used AI to write this. Authenticity and integrity are two core values of mine, so here’s my process:

Every idea and concept you read is mine. I do the thinking. I decide what I want to say to tech leaders, and the stories that bring it to life come from my own work and life.

I also use AI. Claude is my sparring partner. I use it to challenge me on what’s missing and how to make the thinking and stories sharper.

Usually it pulls my thinking into a first draft leveraging my voice profile. Then I speak my own version over the top using Wispr Flow (which is about four times faster than typing), and I tweak until I know it sounds absolutely like me.

That’s it. My thinking, my stories, my voice, with AI making me better at all three.

Because humans who strategically leverage AI will always win.