The symptom
The pattern shows up as a specific kind of slowdown. Sign-off chains that once felt appropriately careful start to feel like drag. Teams that historically moved a decision through two or three reviewers begin routing it through five, not because the decision is riskier but because more people now feel entitled — or obligated — to weigh in. Leaders describe it as the organisation “getting more careful” at precisely the moment the market is rewarding speed. It is a symptom that tends to be noticed first by people managing client or market-facing timelines, who feel the gap between external expectations and internal process directly, and last by senior leadership, who typically only see the decisions that have already cleared the queue.
What leaders usually conclude — and what the evidence suggests instead
The common conclusion is cultural: that Swiss organisational culture is simply cautious, and that caution is the price of quality. There is something to this, but it understates what is actually happening, and it locates the problem in the wrong place.
V. F. Ridgway’s 1956 analysis of performance measurement offers a more precise account. Ridgway found that single, multiple and composite performance measures can all produce undesirable consequences for overall performance — not because the measures are wrong, but because people optimise for what is measured, sometimes at the expense of what the measure was meant to represent. In a precision-oriented culture, “getting it right” is often the informally measured thing, even where speed has become the formally stated priority. The tension in the symptom is not caution versus growth in the abstract — it is two different, partially incompatible measurement systems (one formal, one cultural and informal) both exerting real pressure on the same decision.
Edith Penrose’s argument about managerial capacity supplies the second half of the explanation. Penrose held that growth is constrained less by opportunity than by the capacity of existing management to absorb and direct it. A precision-oriented coordination system — the kind described in the research on why Swiss organisations approach complexity the way they do — has a finite absorption capacity of its own. Below a certain rate of growth, it handles additional volume and complexity by doing what it already does, more of it. Above that rate, the system that used to guarantee careful decisions starts producing slow ones instead, because the same review capacity is being asked to process a volume of decisions it was never sized for.
The causal chain worth making explicit is this: growth increases decision volume; decision volume, run through a fixed review capacity, increases queue length; queue length is what leaders and staff actually experience as “slowness,” even though the underlying cause is a capacity mismatch rather than a change in how carefully any individual decision is being made. This matters because the two explanations point toward different — and in this case genuinely competing — responses. If the cause is read as cultural caution, the instinctive response is to ask people to move faster, which does nothing to the underlying queue and simply adds pressure without adding capacity. If the cause is read accurately as a capacity mismatch, the available responses are different: change what actually needs review, change who is authorised to review it, or accept the trade-off and adjust expectations about pace.
What it looks like in practice
The tension tends to surface first in mid-level coordination roles rather than at the top. Senior leaders often still experience decisions as moving at an acceptable pace, because the decisions that reach them have already been filtered. It is the layer below — where decisions are being routed, reviewed and escalated — that absorbs the growing gap between decision volume and review capacity, frequently without a clear signal reaching leadership that anything has changed.
It also tends to be sector-specific in intensity. Organisations in regulated or reputationally sensitive sectors — where the precision culture is doing real governance work, not just habit — experience the tension more acutely, because slowing down the review process is genuinely costly to unwind quickly. Organisations in less regulated, more internationally staffed sectors report the pattern less often, partly because their coordination habits are newer and partly because the informal cultural pressure toward precision is less deeply embedded.
A common misconception worth naming directly: that the answer is simply “move faster” or “care less.” Ridgway’s own conclusion was the opposite of a call for less measurement or less care — his argument was that undue confidence in any single measure, without understanding its full effects, is the actual source of dysfunction. The tension between precision and growth is not resolved by picking a side; it is a genuine trade-off — one without a clean answer, and one where naming the trade-off accurately is more useful than resolving it artificially.
Left unaddressed, the consequences compound in a specific and often underestimated direction: senior people, not junior ones, absorb the growing gap first, because escalation is itself part of the precision-oriented coordination habit. A decision that would once have been resolved at the point where it arose instead travels upward, because the people closest to it no longer have clear confidence that resolving it themselves falls within their remit at the new scale. The result is a senior team that experiences the organisation as increasingly demanding of their direct attention, even as headcount and formal delegation on paper suggest the opposite should be happening.
Where this shows up
The questions here are set in Zurich. More Perspectives for this market are on the Zurich page, and the Markets index shows the other business hubs.
Questions worth considering
- Is the organisation’s review capacity sized for its current decision volume, or for the volume it had when the process was designed?
- Where does the informal, cultural measure of “getting it right” conflict with the formally stated priority of speed — and who is absorbing that conflict?
- Is slower decision-making in a particular function a governance necessity, or an inherited habit that has outlived the risk it was managing?
Your team is facing similar challenges?
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