A small decision took four weeks. Nobody asked why, because everyone assumed there was a reason. A process. A stakeholder. A dependency with a very important calendar. There was no process. The question landed on one desk, slid under something more urgent, and stayed there until somebody chased it.
Would you say so? Out loud, to the people who waited: “It took four weeks because I forgot.” Most of us would find a process. Processes are always available, and process doesn’t care if it gets blamed. Sometimes transparency won’t be found even if you look for it with the magnifying glass…
Four weeks, twenty minutes of thinking
I suspect most slow decisions are not hard. They are waiting. Strip a four-week decision down to the actual thinking, and you often find twenty minutes of it, with weeks of queue around it.
And the queue is invisible. When an employee misses a deadline, everyone can see it. When a leader’s inbox misses one, nobody can, because nobody can see the inbox. The delay stays deniable, and the people who pay for it cannot see where their question went.
A short taxonomy of late
There are about five reasons a decision is late. It needed information. It needed another person. It was parked on purpose, because the timing was wrong. It was avoided, because nobody wanted to be the one. Or it was forgotten.
Only the first three ever get reported. The last two are relabelled “alignment”. The last two are also closer than they look. I suspect a good share of forgetting is avoidance in a nicer coat.
Transparency is for the whole organization
We love transparency, as long as it is aimed at someone else. Who contributed what, who is carrying whom? There is a reason. Karau and Williams went through 78 studies in 1993 and found that effort drops in groups when nobody can tell who contributed what. There is a mirror effect too. When people expect colleagues to coast on something that matters, they work harder to cover. A team average hides both the passenger and the two doing the work of three.
So transparency down to the individual is what you would need for real data. It is also scary. It is scary for the one coasting, for the one carrying, and for everyone who worries about being watched. The research on watching is not kind. Bernstein’s factory experiment found that more observability made workers hide and perform. Meta-analyses of electronic monitoring find stress, not better performance. Knowing who owns an outcome is not the same as tracking keystrokes. One makes contributions identifiable. The other makes people feel watched.
Individual transparency for the team, starting Monday. Leadership transparency, pending a review of the right format.
Meanwhile, in a hospital
In the 1990s Amy Edmondson set out to show that better-led hospital teams make fewer medication errors. She studied eight nursing units. The best-led teams reported the most errors, about ten times more than the worst.
They were not making more mistakes. They were willing to say so. In the open units, nurse managers discussed their own mistakes with staff. The units that reported almost nothing were not safer. They were quieter. A spotless error record, it turns out, is often a sign of excellent public relations.
A leader saying “I forgot” is the same mechanism, at a smaller scale. The leader sets the price of admitting for the whole team.
The risk is real, though. If people react badly when you say “I forgot”, everyone watching learns that being honest costs something. The next time, they will blame a process too.
What a leader can show
Not a calendar. A calendar shows activity, and we have been through what that is worth. Show the decisions. How long each one waited and which of the five reasons it was. How many came to them that the team could have decided itself? How often one was reopened or quietly overridden. And what the leader changed in themselves. Yes, including the column that says “forgot”.
There is some evidence that this helps. People accept even unfavourable outcomes when they see how the decision was made as fair. In one lab experiment, managers gave more to employees when their decision was visible, even though they were paid to do the opposite. A 2026 review found that clearly explained managerial decisions reduced uncertainty and resistance during change.
Some things stay closed. A merger or a personnel matter cannot be public. What can be open is the process and the timing: that a decision is being made, who owns it, and when the answer is coming.
Your turn?
Next time a decision of yours sits too long, say the real reason in the room, in one sentence. Then watch what the room does with it. If it lands well, you have made it cheaper for everyone else to do the same.
What was the last decision of yours that sat too long, and what did everyone assume was the reason?
