Before you read on, two things worth five minutes of your week: find your weakest productivity vector with the free Productivity Assessment, and if you want to fix the way your team decides rather than the way it looks busy, join Productive, Not Busy, the live cohort where leaders rebuild how their work actually moves.
You already know which decision is stuck. It has a name, a Slack thread, and a meeting series. Everyone involved agrees on what should happen. Nothing happens because nobody can point to the person who gets to say yes.
Slow decision making is the quietest cost in corporate Life, and it never shows up in a report. A wrong call gets reviewed, written up, and learned from. A call that takes eleven weeks gets filed as diligence. Preston Chandler, Global Strategic Operations Lead at WPP and co-owner of Centered, has spent two decades measuring what that delay actually does to a business, and his answer on the ProductiviTree podcast was immediate.
Santi asked him which is more expensive for a company: a fast decision that turns out wrong, or a slow decision that is right. Preston did not hesitate. “Slow decision every time, and there’s actually a lot of research on that.”
This article walks through why that is true, how to see decision latency inside your own team, and what to change on Monday. By the end, you will have a way to measure something your dashboard has never tracked, and a test for whether the empowerment you hand out is real.
Slow decision making is still a decision
The reason delay costs more than error is structural. While you wait, you are not undecided. You have already chosen the status quo, over and over, without putting your name on it.
Preston put it like this: “What happens with a slow decision is that technically you already made a decision not to change.” Then he described the loop every stalled initiative runs through. “you’re continually saying I’m not changing I’m not changing I’m not changing and then eventually you say okay I’ll change and it might happen to be right but you’ve lost the opportunity along the way.”
There is a compounding effect on top of the lost opportunity. Speed and learning move together. “The companies that tend to make faster decisions tend to learn from their decisions faster,” Preston said. A team that decides weekly runs fifty experiments a year. A team that decides quarterly runs four, and each one carries so much accumulated expectation that nobody dares call it a failure.
So the choice is never between a good decision and a bad one. It is between a decision you can learn from this month and a decision you will still be defending next year.
Forty hours a week spent deciding who works on what
Preston works inside a holding company of roughly a hundred thousand people, which makes the pattern easy to see at scale. Before the change, senior leaders were burning forty hours a week on resourcing. A full working week, every week, spent deciding which person sits on which piece of work.
That is not an exotic failure. It is the standard way agencies work, and Preston is blunt about how old it is. “The agency world, the marketing agency world, was stuck 30 years in the past.”
Notice what forty hours of resourcing meetings actually represents. It is a decision made repeatedly by people far from the work because no team owns its own composition. Every one of those hours is decision-making speed that could belong to someone closer to the problem.
If you want a quick read on where your own week leaks, the Productivity Assessment scores you across the four vectors and shows which one is dragging the rest down.
Decision-making speed is the KPI nobody reports
Santi has built reporting for two decades, and he raised the thing that should bother every operations leader. “Decision-making speed or decision-making lag, it’s a KPI I’ve never ever seen in any report.”
Preston’s explanation of why is uncomfortable and correct. Leaders are “very unlikely to put forward a metric that makes themselves look bad.” And unlike revenue or churn, this one is easy to bury. “It’s just easy to hide,” he said. “It hides behind the scenes. We’re not tracking how long it took to make a decision.”
Cycle time on a ticket gets measured. Time to close a deal gets measured. The time between a question being raised and a human being accountable for the answer is not measured anywhere, which is exactly why it grows.
You do not need a new system to start. Pick five decisions from the last quarter. Write down the date the need was first raised and the date someone committed. The gap is your baseline, and it will be larger than anyone on your leadership team would guess.
Empowerment at work, and the version that is only theatre
Here is where the diagnosis gets personal for anyone who manages people. Preston described a sentence he hears constantly from leaders who believe they have delegated.
“Instead of really giving the decision to Santi to go and make, we say things like, You’re empowered, go and work it out, and then come back to me for approval. That’s not empowerment.”
Read that again, because the second clause cancels the first. The person does all the deciding and none of the authority. What they learn is that their judgement is a draft and yours is the decision.
Real empowerment at work has a simpler shape. “True empowerment says, you own the decision. I trust you.” Preston described what happens when trust is withheld instead. “The less you trust someone, the less they will try, the slower they will learn. So we’re really cutting ourselves off at the knees.”
And the safety that approval cycles promise is largely fictional. “It doesn’t make them safe on every decision. It just makes them slow.”
One owner per decision, and why RACI gets in the way
Preston’s core operating principle is decision ownership, stated as plainly as he can. Leaders “need to have a clear perspective on what people own. Not exactly what they’re doing every day, but what people own. What decisions does someone own?”
The failure mode he sees far more often is diffusion. “Often nobody owns a decision. The decision is a consensus decision. It’s a committee decision. Nobody really owns it.” His verdict on that way of working is short. “Decisions by committee suck. They’re bad.”
In a cross-functional team, that doesn’t mean everyone defers to a manager. It means ownership is distributed by craft and vision. The art director owns the visual art. The copywriter owns the copy. Someone owns the whole vision. It never means a show of hands. “It is not a democracy, it’s not a vote,” Preston said, and later, “who is the decision maker? It’s not a vote.”
Which brings him to the tool a generation of operations teams has been trained to draw. The RACI chart divides responsibility from accountability, and Preston thinks the split is the whole problem. “RACI charts, you know, responsible, accountable, consulted, informed, I think they’re horrible. We should never use them. Because it implies that responsibility and accountability can be split.”
His recommendation when an effort genuinely has no owner is harder than it sounds. “often I would say then then completely disband the effort.” If nobody will own it, “It’s just a waste of time.”
The leader who stopped approving anything
Preston told a story about a German leader who decided to remove himself as the bottleneck, and the method is worth copying.
He told his people: “Don’t bring work to me for approval. I’m happy to have you bring it to me for some feedback, but do not bring it to me for approval.”
Then he held the line. Months went by with no approvals issued. When someone arrived with work and the old expectation, he asked a single question: “Do you want approval or do you want feedback?” If the answer was approval, his reply was what made it work. “If that’s the case, you make the decision, I will back you up.”
Over roughly three months, he approved something once or twice. Preston’s summary of what happened is the distinction every manager misses. “he forced the decision back onto the people. Without without abdicating.”
Abdication is walking away. This meant staying present, offering judgment as input, and refusing to sign off. The backstop was explicit, which is why people actually used the authority they were given.
Why bureaucracy protects itself
If the fix were only about intent, it would have happened already. Preston’s view is that the structures around slow decision making are self-reinforcing by design.
He described bureaucracy as something that “exists to Strengthen itself,” and added the line that explains why reorganisations rarely shrink anything. “it is against the nature of a bureaucracy to shrink itself.”
Complexity plays the same role at the individual level. A process only you can explain makes you difficult to remove and keeps your calendar full of work that feels demanding. Richard Koch’s The 80/20 Principle is about stripping that away, and Santi named the incentive directly during the conversation: managers hold on to complexity because it makes them indispensable.
Preston has numbers that expose the result. “Established marketing agencies typically have a leader-to-doer ratio of about one to two. One leader for every two doers.” Compare that with the challengers. “An up-and-coming marketing agency has a leader-to-doer ratio of about one to ten.”
One leader for every two people doing the work means approval is the main product. He also cited a finding he could not source but keeps seeing confirmed, that “eight out of nine leaders should never have been made leaders,” and an observation that should change how you promote. “being a great individual contributor does not make you a great leader. In fact, what we find is that the mediocre individual contributors usually make the best leaders.”
Will AI make your decisions faster
This is where leaders are currently pinning their hopes, and Preston’s answer is that the technology makes the bottleneck worse until the human side changes.
“AI can provide so much data so fast that it quickly overwhelms our ability to make a decision,” he said. The arithmetic is brutal. “We used to have, you know, 10 ideas and we had to decide which one of them to move on. Well, in the same period of time, we can get 100,000 ideas now.” And the constraint has not moved. “We can only move on five of them.”
He connects that to the failure rate everyone quotes. “The failure rate for AI initiatives is like 95%. My hypothesis is that the five percent actually changed the human side of things.”
His image for adding capacity without fixing the decision structure has stayed with me. “It’s like throwing a bunch more cars onto the highway and thinking that we’re gonna get there faster. It it doesn’t. It just creates a traffic jam.”
What to do on Monday morning
Preston gave one assignment, and it takes about twenty minutes.
“Pick a decision and then trace it back and just figure out like how did that decision actually get made? Track back the path, figure out what happened, and and then pause and ask, did we actually need all those steps? Could one person have made this decision, or should they have made it to begin with?
Do it on a decision that already landed, so nobody is defending a live position. Map every person it touched and every wait state between them. Then answer the second question honestly, because the answer is usually one name.
Two more diagnostics from the conversation are worth running at the same time.
The first is the ritual Preston would delete from corporate Life without hesitation: “Approval cycles.” His instruction follows from everything above. “Stop approving stuff.” And: “just give people the authority to do stuff.”
The second is a listening test. Certain phrases reliably mark a decision that has quietly died in the room. “Let’s table that and get back to it.” “We need to take this offline.” “We need to go and research this and then come back.” Santi’s reaction to the second one speaks for everyone who has sat through it: “It’s one of the biggest productivity killer sentences ever invented by Corporate. I’m like, we’re literally here to discuss this.”
Count how many times you hear those three in a week. That number is your decision latency, expressed in language.
Frequently asked questions about slow decision making
Why does slow decision making cost more than a wrong decision?
Because waiting is itself a choice to keep the current approach, and it comes without the learning a wrong call gives you. Teams that decide faster also correct faster, so they accumulate knowledge while slower teams accumulate justification.
How do you measure decision-making speed?
Take a sample of recent decisions and record two dates: when the need was first raised, and when a named person committed. The gap is your decision latency. Track it alongside your existing cycle-time metrics, and it will stop hiding.
What does real empowerment at work look like?
The person owns the outcome and does not return for a signature. The test is simple: if the words “come back to me for approval” appear anywhere in the handover, the authority never actually moved.
Should we use a RACI chart to clarify decisions?
Preston argues against it, because separating responsibility from accountability lets both sit with nobody. One named owner per decision, with the people whose craft is affected owning their own part, does the same job without the ambiguity.
Can AI speed up decision making?
Only after the human structure changes. AI multiplies the options you can generate while leaving your capacity to choose and execute roughly where it was, which widens the gap instead of closing it.
Where to go next
Decision making sits inside the Ownership vector of the ProductiviTree framework, and for medium and large companies it is the element that moves everything else. A team that can decide in a day does not need heroic effort to hit its goals. A team that takes three months to agree on a chair will not be rescued by a better tool.
Preston’s books are worth your time if you run teams. The Agile Code, written with John Heather, covers the principles of leading cross-functional teams through innovation and is available as a free PDF. Breakthrough Innovation argues that breakthroughs are manufactured rather than stumbled upon. In his words, “something that we can manufacture,” and “it’s not, you know, catching lightning in the bottle.” A third book, ADAPT, is on the way. You can find all of it at centered.work.
If you want to find out which vector is holding your own week together and which one is quietly costing you, start with the free Productivity Assessment. When you are ready to rebuild how your team decides, with other leaders doing the same work, Productive, Not Busy runs live on Maven and takes you through all sixteen elements, focusing on the decisions you are actually stuck on.
Listen to the full conversation with Preston Chandler on the ProductiviTree podcast, and bring one stuck decision with you.