The observation
Bain & Company’s research into organisational decision-making, drawn from a survey of executives at more than 350 global companies, found that only a small minority believed their organisation’s decision structure genuinely helped it outperform competitors — and identified four recurring points where decisions stall: between global and local levels, between a central function and a business unit, between one function and another, and between the organisation and outside partners. The first of these — global versus local — is precisely the terrain that geographic expansion opens up, often before a company has any deliberate view on how it intends to navigate it.
A related pattern is visible in a common early response to geographic growth: adding a management layer specifically to relieve directors who are becoming overloaded as the business spreads across locations. Consider an organisation that does exactly this. A new layer of managers is introduced. Decision speed, rather than improving, slows down.
What it means in practice
The instinctive explanation, when a newly introduced layer coincides with slower decisions, is that the new managers are inexperienced or unusually cautious — reasonable people, new to a level of responsibility, taking time to find their footing. Sometimes that is exactly what is happening. But in the scenario above, a different mechanism turns out to be doing most of the work: the new layer was given responsibility for a region or function without a corresponding transfer of decision authority. The new managers coordinate. They prepare recommendations. The decisions themselves still travel upward to where they always went. The layer has added a step to the process without adding any actual capacity to decide — the load has been redistributed in appearance, not in substance.
This is a specific and recognisable version of the bottleneck Rogers and Blenko describe: authority was never actually relocated to match where the work was relocated. Geographic expansion makes this especially easy to get wrong, because opening a new location genuinely does require new local roles — someone has to be physically present, coordinating and representing the business on the ground — and it is entirely possible to create those roles thoroughly, with real titles and real responsibility for outcomes, while leaving the underlying authority to actually decide untouched. The organisation gains presence in a new place without gaining the ability to act quickly there, and the gap between the two is often not visible until something urgent needs a fast local decision and cannot get one.
Where it varies
The severity of this pattern depends heavily on what kind of decisions the new location actually needs to make locally. A business expanding into a new city with an identical regulatory environment, an identical customer base and an identical product may need relatively little genuine local authority — most decisions remain sensibly centralised, and the new layer’s coordinating role may be exactly right. A business expanding into a genuinely different market — different regulation, different customer expectations, different competitive dynamics — faces a much harder problem, because centralising decisions that require local context creates delay on exactly the decisions where delay is most costly: pricing responses, local partnership terms, adjustments to product or service that a distant central function cannot assess as quickly or as well as someone actually present in the market.
Company size and growth pace also shape how visible this becomes. A company opening a second location after years of stability has more time to notice and correct a mismatch between responsibility and authority before opening a third or fourth. A company expanding into several new geographies within a short period compounds the same structural gap across multiple locations simultaneously, which tends to make the pattern both more consequential and, paradoxically, harder to diagnose — because with several new locations each showing some friction, it is easy to attribute the difficulty to the specific challenges of each individual market rather than to a single, repeated structural cause common to all of them.
There is also a genuine trade-off underneath this, not just an error to correct. Decentralising real decision authority to new locations carries its own risk: inconsistency, divergence from group standards, decisions made by people who do not yet have full organisational context. Centralising protects consistency at the cost of speed. Neither position is simply correct — Rogers and Blenko’s research is explicit that the right allocation of decision rights depends on the specific decision in question, not on a blanket preference for centralisation or devolution. The mistake the pattern above illustrates is not choosing centralisation; it is failing to choose deliberately at all, adding a layer of apparent local ownership without ever resolving, one way or the other, what that layer is actually empowered to decide.
A further complication specific to geographic expansion is time zones and physical distance, which interact with the authority question in a way that is easy to underestimate. Even where authority genuinely has been decentralised on paper, if the people who hold it are new to the role, still building relationships with headquarters, or simply unsure whether they are expected to use the authority they nominally have, they will often default to seeking confirmation before acting — which reproduces the same delay as if the authority had never moved at all, just through hesitation rather than formal escalation. Distance widens the gap between decisions on paper and decisions in practice, because the informal cues that might otherwise correct a hesitant new manager — a colleague noticing and saying “you don’t need to check that with us” — travel less easily across time zones and less frequently across occasional video calls than they would across a shared office.
The same pattern appears across many kinds of organisation; see Other Sectors for how it is read elsewhere.
Questions worth considering
- For decisions that now sit closer to a new location than to headquarters, has authority actually moved with them, or only the coordination work?
- Which category of decision genuinely benefits from local speed and context, and which category is better served by remaining centralised — and has that distinction been made explicitly?
- If a new management layer were removed tomorrow, would decisions actually slow down further, or would they simply return to travelling the same route they already do?
More on this topic: Growth.
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