Somewhere in your organisation, the same decision gets made over and over – and slightly differently each time.
A pricing exception. An account priority. How far to bend the roadmap to win a deal.
No one notices, because each instance looks like normal work. Someone faces a live situation, weighs it, makes a call, moves on. Reasonable people, deciding reasonably.
But step back and watch the pattern across a quarter. The same question keeps arriving, and it keeps getting answered from scratch. By whoever happens to be holding it. Under deadline. With only the slice of context their seat provides.
The answer depends on who is in the room and how much pressure they are under that day.
So the organisation has no settled position on the thing. It has a scatter of local positions no one has ever compared. Two of them would contradict each other if they were ever laid side by side.
They never are.
This is not an execution problem. The people are deciding fine. It is that a decision which should have been made once, deliberately, above the field, was left to be re-made continuously inside it.
The judgement was never wrong.
It was just never placed.
And the cost is invisible, because nothing fails. Each call holds on its own. What you lose is coherence – the same situation resolving the same way regardless of who meets it. And you lose it so gradually that it never looks like a decision anyone made.
Most of these are knowable in advance. They recur. You can name them, decide which should be settled once, and free your people to spend judgement on what is genuinely situational.
Which recurring decisions in your organisation are being resolved ad hoc, under pressure, by people with only partial context?
This question closes a chapter of The Architecture of Commercial Performance, where the thinking behind it is developed in full.
