Frontline Facts Beat HQ Opinions—Let Them Decide

The Hidden Tax on Growth

Decision-making systems that are too centralized impose a secret economic burden which obstructs national development.

Your role as the final decision maker turns you into a queue controller instead of a company leader.

Queues slow growth. They frustrate talent. They make customers wait.

Speed is a strategy. Most organizations experience speed failures because their employees are not the cause of these problems. Speed fails because decisions sit in inboxes, waiting for “the person” to say yes.

What overcentralization looks like

Small choices escalate up. Teams pause during vacations. “The procedure for fast approval now demands participants to join scheduled group meetings which occur once per week. Leaders maintain a permanent state of constant activity yet they fail to generate substantial results. The execution process weighs heavily on me.

The cost compounds. Deals slip a quarter. Releases miss the window. Good people choose to depart because they lack the ability to determine results. The system requires students to pay through delayed learning and poor accountability and increased operational costs.

When centralization is correct (on purpose)

Executive-level decisions must be made for company-defining capital choices and brand or legal risk management and crisis response and M&A activities and risk appetite determination. These are few. Everything else should move to the edge, with clear guardrails.

Why leaders overcentralize (even smart ones)

Three common causes:

1. Unclear decision rights. The organizational chart displays the reporting structure between employees but it does not indicate who holds decision-making authority.

2. Data asymmetry. Leaders depend on information that front line personnel do not receive for their risk assessment.

3. Control anxiety. The placement of controls at the center point creates a secure environment which results in a step-by-step decrease of threshold values.

The solution needs to handle root causes of problems instead of dealing with apparent symptoms.

Design decision rights, not more meetings

Create an initial document which lists your 15 most frequent business decisions (pricing adjustments and discount approvals and feature deployment and employee recruitment and vendor expenses and credit authorization and handling unusual cases). For each, define:

The system requires only one person to serve as the decision owner who will take full responsibility for decisions rather than a group of people.

• Type: routine, material, strategic.

The system requires three separate threshold values to activate alerts based on value, risk score or customer impact level.

• Roles: Recommend, Approve, Input, Execute (keep RAPID/RACI lightweight).

• SLA: The speed at which decisions occur (e.g., 48 hours routine, 10 days strategic).

Clarity beats charisma. People require a map instead of additional town hall meetings.

The system enables speed control by using guardrails which function as protective barriers against potential dangers.

Guardrails are not red tape. They are freedom written down.

Examples that work:

The sales team holds the power to grant price reductions which amount to 2% of the complete purchase value. CFO approves above.”

• Risk score: “Launch if risk ≤ X and budget ≤ $Y; else escalate.”

• Brand/legal triggers: “Any change that affects public statements or regulated disclosures escalates.”

The checklist requires basic information which includes facts and options and trade-offs and decision owner and time requirements.

The system allows 80% of decisions to operate automatically without your need to intervene. The remaining 20% of people experience fast growth while being part of their environment.

Equip the front line to decide well

A system which does not have appropriate tools creates dangerous circumstances. Provide:

The organization utilizes three standardized templates for its operations which include a one-page decision memo and a risk checklist and a pricing playbook.

Users can access dashboards through the system which display revenue data alongside margin information and NPS scores and incident rates.

The training program includes instruction on risk thinking and variance analysis and "disagree-and-commit" practices.

The review process after decisions (20 minutes) will focus on facts only and will introduce one improvement at a time.

Managers need to train their staff to operate independently without needing to verify their adherence to rules.

Metrics your board will respect

The way you measure things will influence how people behave. Track:

• Decision cycle time: request to decision.

• Rework rate: decisions reopened or overturned.

• Edge ratio: The percentage of decisions which are made at the most junior level of responsibility.

• Throughput: decisions closed per week per team.

The talent signal consists of manager eNPS scores together with regrettable attrition rates that affect decision-heavy positions.

Share these monthly. Organizations need to recognize groups that follow proper decision-making safety protocols.

A 30-day pilot (no reorg required)

Week 1: List the top 15 bottleneck decisions. Tag by risk and value. Pick two to pilot.

Week 2 requires the creation of a one-page document that outlines decision rights and thresholds and Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Publish and train.

Weeks 3–4: Run the pilot. Hold weekly PDRs. The system should compare the current cycle time and rework to the baseline values. Expand what works.

The approach generates momentum through its direct implementation which eliminates the need for committees and extensive one-year change programs.

CFO lens: speed with control

The finance teams have shown their concerns about both leakage and compliance problems. Solve it in the design:

The thresholds need to be connected to both the risk appetite declaration and the delegation of authority (DoA) matrix.

The system needs to perform automated checks through its programming for discount caps and approval routing and spend analytics.

The three lines of defense model should be implemented as follows: Business owners make decisions while risk sets boundaries and audit tests the effectiveness of these measures.

• Report exceptions monthly. Threshold adjustment should base its process on actual loss events rather than emotional responses.

The system requires basic automatic controls which maintain proper proportional responses.

The Founder/CEO needs to release control for business expansion to occur.

Founders fear that giving up operational control will result in the loss of their core mission. The core elements of your mission and standards and essential non-negotiables (brand, safety, compliance) must remain inviolable. The “how” needs to be defined through limits.

Adopt “disagree-and-commit.” The only method to maintain speed exists when smart people have different opinions.

A short case (composite)

A MENA fintech centralized every price exception with the CEO. Sales slowed. Churn rose.

The organization set performance targets which sales managers needed to achieve ≤1.5% and regional heads needed to achieve ≤3% and CFOs required to surpass these targets. The team provided a one-pager document and risk checklist and set a 48-hour Service Level Agreement (SLA).

The decision cycle time decreased by 62% throughout one quarter. Win rate improved 6 points. Net margin held. The CEO got 10 hours a week back. This is typical when you remove the queue.

Your next step

Ask your team members to point out decisions which require your approval but should be handled by other team members.

The first step to begin is to list five things you can do in one minute.

Decision-making processes need deliberate design approaches instead of depending on hopeful predictions.

Speed follows structure.

References

https://www.3msbusiness.com/the-risks-of-overdependence-on-a-few-customers

https://www.3msbusiness.com/pitfalls-of-overambitious-expansion-grow-safely

Harvard Business Review — “What’s Your Organization’s Decision-Making Style?” (2020): https://hbr.org/2020/01/whats-your-organizations-decision-making-style

The McKinsey & Company report “Decision making in uncertain times” from 2021 provides information at https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/decision-making-in-uncertain-times.

Bain & Company provides an overview of their RAPID Decision Making approach through their website at https://www.bain.com/insights/rapid-decision-making/.

Saudi Capital Market Authority (CMA) — Corporate Governance Regulations (amended 2023): https://cma.org.sa/RulesRegulations/Regulations/Pages/default.aspx