A director I worked with kept a printout taped to the side of her monitor. It listed the nine people whose approval she needed to move a mid-six-figure vendor contract, in the order they had to sign, because two of them refused to look at anything until the name above them had weighed in. She had drawn little boxes next to each one and checked them off like a preflight card. The contract was not controversial. Nobody in the chain had ever rejected one. The list existed because, four years earlier, a different director had signed a bad deal, and every name on her printout was a fence somebody put up after that fire so the same fire could never start again.

Her company would have told you, correctly, that it had a decision-making problem. What it could not have told you, because almost nobody sees it from the inside, is that the problem and the fences were the same thing.

The complaint that keeps coming back

LHH, a talent and leadership-development firm, surveyed more than 2,500 companies at the end of 2025 and found that one in four senior leaders say their own decision-making processes do not adequately support what the organization needs, and that ineffective decision-making has sat among the top constraints on leadership for two years running.1 Not one year, where you might blame a rough patch. Two. The same leaders, looking at the same machinery, reporting the same failure, after a full year with every incentive to fix it.

When a problem lasts that long inside capable people who genuinely want it gone, the common explanation is usually the wrong one. The common explanation is that the process needs more discipline. A cleaner intake form, or a steering committee to keep an eye on the other committees. So that gets added. And the next year, one in four leaders raise their hand again.

Why the fixes make it worse

Here is what operators tend to miss until they have lived through a few rounds of it. Almost every gate in a decision process was installed the day after something went wrong. A launch shipped with a defect, so now launches route through a quality review. A hire did not pan out, so offers need a second panel. None of these was foolish on the day it was created. Each one answered a specific injury. The catch is that the injuries pile up and the answers never come back out, and what you are left with is scar tissue. Tissue that forms to protect a joint, layer over layer, until the joint can barely move.

The organization comes to treat this as weather. People speak about "the process" as though it rolled in from somewhere else, a climate to be survived. It did not roll in. It was written, one well-meant fence at a time, mostly by people who have since moved on to other jobs. Because no single addition ever felt like the problem, no single removal feels like the cure, and so nothing gets removed.

A slow decision is rarely the work of one bad rule. It is the compound interest on a hundred good ones, none of which anybody now remembers agreeing to.

What a leader can actually do about it

You cannot delegate your way clear of this, and reorganizing will not touch it either, because the scar tissue lives in the routing rather than the org chart. What works is unglamorous. You take a real decision that recently crawled through the system, and you walk it backward one gate at a time, and at each gate you ask who this step protects against and whether that threat is still alive. Most of the time the honest answer is that the step guards against a person who left in 2022, or against a mistake a newer tool now catches on its own. Now and then it guards a risk the company decided years ago it was willing to carry. Those steps come out. Not all of them, and a leaner process is not the goal for its own sake. The point is only that a process nobody prunes will do the one thing it knows how to do, which is grow.

I once sat on a review board where a single person did all the actual analysis and the rest of us were there to ratify it. That is a committee doing the work of a signature while calling itself diligence, and it is the kind of thing that survives for years because removing it would require somebody to admit it was never needed. The agile teams I trusted most treated their decision rights as something you revisit on a schedule, out loud, with standing permission to cut. The ones that struggled treated every past agreement as load-bearing, so their structure only ever gained weight. I have watched a capable executive inherit a decision system so overbuilt that her whole first year went to learning its corridors instead of asking whether it should exist in that shape at all.

The director with the printout eventually did the walk-back. Of her nine approvers, four were guarding against things that had stopped existing. The chain dropped from nine to five, and the contracts did not get worse. What changed is that she stopped losing a week of every month to being a courier for her own authority. That week was the real cost, and it had been invisible the whole time, because it never appeared as a line on any report.

So here is what I would ask any leader whose team keeps naming decision-making as the thing holding it back. When did you last take a step out instead of adding one, and if you cannot recall, who exactly is the process still protecting you from?