The finding
Consider an organisation where a significant supplier decision is taken in March. It resurfaces in June, and again in September, each time reaching broadly the same conclusion. On the surface this looks like indecision at senior level — the kind of leadership hesitation that gets quietly criticised in the corridor afterwards.
Look closer, though, and each revisit is triggered by a different person, none of whom was present for the original discussion and none of whom had any record of how it was reasoned through. What existed was the outcome — a line in a set of minutes, a decision logged somewhere — but not the reasoning that produced it. Every new participant, acting entirely reasonably, reopened a question that had already, in effect, been answered.
Paul Rogers and Marcia Blenko’s Bain research into decision rights, published in Harvard Business Review, is useful here even though it wasn’t framed around record-keeping specifically. Their survey of executives at more than 350 companies found decision-making stalling at recurring points — centre versus business unit, function versus function — and a great deal of what makes those stalls costly is that the same ground gets covered again each time a decision crosses one of those boundaries.
What makes the March-June-September pattern particularly easy to miss is that each individual meeting looks, from the inside, like healthy governance rather than waste. A group convened, discussed a real issue thoughtfully, and reached a considered conclusion. Nobody in any of the three meetings was behaving carelessly. The waste only becomes visible when the three instances are placed side by side — a view that, in most organisations, nobody naturally has, because each meeting is logged and filed separately from the others.
What it means in practice
The organisation in this scenario records what it decided but not why. That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. A decision without its reasoning attached isn’t really settled — it’s just unopposed for the moment. The first person who wasn’t in the room, and has no access to the reasoning, has every incentive to ask the question again, because from where they’re standing, it hasn’t actually been resolved.
This is a different failure from indecisiveness, and confusing the two matters, because the two point toward opposite remedies. Indecisiveness suggests the organisation needs stronger, more confident leaders willing to commit to a call and hold it. This pattern suggests something closer to the opposite risk — that the organisation already has confident, capable people committing to sound calls repeatedly, and what’s missing is nothing about their judgement, only a way of carrying that judgement’s basis forward to whoever needs it next. Treating this as a leadership confidence problem, when it’s really an information-carrying problem, tends to produce coaching and training aimed at people who were never the actual constraint.
This is a genuinely different failure from indecisiveness, and confusing the two matters. Indecisiveness is a leadership trait; this is closer to an information problem. The people involved may be entirely capable of deciding — they simply keep deciding the same thing from scratch, at real cost each time, because nothing carries the earlier reasoning forward to the next person who needs it.
Where this varies
The cost of this pattern is easy to underestimate precisely because each individual instance looks efficient. The March discussion took an hour. So did June. So did September. Nobody would describe any one of those meetings as wasted time — the group reasoned carefully and reached a sound conclusion. What’s invisible is the three hours, spread across two quarters, spent re-deriving a conclusion the organisation had already reached, along with whatever confidence erodes when a “settled” decision keeps resurfacing.
The pattern shows up more in organisations with higher turnover in senior roles, more matrixed reporting lines, or faster growth — all conditions that increase the odds that the next person to touch a decision wasn’t there for the last one. It shows up less in stable, smaller teams where institutional memory travels informally, through people rather than through any recorded system. That’s worth naming honestly: this isn’t a universal failure mode. It’s a cost that scales with exactly the kind of growth and change that most strategy execution is trying to navigate.
There’s also a compounding effect worth noting. Each time a decision is reopened and reconfirmed, the organisation gains a second and sometimes a third independent instance of people reasoning their way to the same conclusion — which can feel, misleadingly, like validation. It isn’t quite that. It’s three groups solving the same problem separately, at three times the cost, arriving at an answer that a single well-documented decision would have delivered once.
The same pattern appears across many kinds of organisation; see Other Sectors for how it is read elsewhere.
Questions worth considering
- What is the actual cost, compounded across a year, of decisions that have to be defended repeatedly because their basis was never captured?
- When a decision resurfaces, is that a sign the original conclusion was wrong — or a sign that nobody currently in the room knows why it was right?
- How would a leadership team know the difference between a strategy question worth reopening and one that’s simply being asked again by someone new to the room?
This perspective is part of Strategy Execution.
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