When a company is stuck, the same sentence always shows up: “We don’t have the people.”
Or the budget. Or the time. Or the system.
It sounds plausible. It feels right. And it rarely describes what is actually blocking.
The bottleneck may sit in what no longer fits. In what was never built. In what has been there all along and nobody uses.
Three different shapes. Behind each one, the same question: who decided it should stay this way?
Usually nobody.
Working inside a business every day changes how you see it. That is not a flaw. It is part of reality. What exists becomes normal. So does what is missing. And what has become normal never gets decided.
The sentences that replace decisions
You don’t see unmade decisions. You hear them. They have their own language:
“We should look at this properly at some point.”
“Let’s take this offline.”
“Let’s wait and see how it develops.”
“This isn’t the right moment.”
“We’ll decide once the numbers are in.”
Every one of these sentences sounds reasonable. And every one has the same effect: the decision leaves the room, and nobody takes it along.
Count them in your next leadership meeting. Not the decisions. The deferrals.
The disguise
Why does nobody just say “I don’t want to decide this”? Because the decision would be uncomfortable. So it gets rebuilt into a resource question.
The project, now in its third year, that nobody wants anymore? Still running, because “nobody has time to plan the wind-down.” The truth: nobody decided to end it.
The position that has been open for eight months? “Tough market.” The truth: the profile was never decided, because two departments want two different roles.
The price list from two years ago? “We haven’t gotten around to it.” The truth: the positioning question underneath it has no owner.
An unmade decision looks like a resource problem. That is its best disguise. Because a resource problem has one great advantage: nobody is at fault.
What it costs
Unmade decisions don’t disappear. They get delegated, downward, into the daily business.
If leadership doesn’t decide the pricing question, sales decides it. Every day, in every discount. If nobody decides which of the two systems counts, every employee decides for themselves.
So the company makes the decision anyway. Just unmanaged, a thousand times over, and differently every time.
That shows up on no invoice. And it is the most expensive line item in the company.
The stop list
In every Strategic Map I hand over, one quadrant does more than all the others: the stop list. What stops now.
It works not because stopping is hard. It works because it pulls unmade decisions out of deferral language and gives them three things: an owner, a date, an end.
Most companies don’t need another initiative. They need the three decisions that have been deferred for months.
Listen for the deferral sentences in your next meeting. Each one marks a decision that is still missing. That is where movement can begin.
Patrick Thole, Disruption Dynamics, Zürich
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