How fast the org moves from "we need to decide" to decided. Every layer between signal and action is a tax. Most orgs don't know how much they're paying.
SIGNAL → DECISION → ACTION
Authority sits close to the problem. Teams decide without escalating. Budget moves in days, not quarters. Nobody waits for a meeting to fix an obvious problem.
Decisions go upward to people far from the work, then back down. By the time approval lands, the context has shifted. The org doesn't move slowly on purpose. It built a structure that can't do anything else.
Decision Latency is the metabolic rate of the organization. Speed everything else can move at is capped by how fast this one thing moves.
Each sign-off adds time without adding value. A decision that needs five approvals doesn't get five times better. It gets five times slower. Most of the cost isn't the delay itself, it's what doesn't happen while you're waiting.
Approval chains don't exist to slow things down. They exist because someone, at some point, made a mistake and added a checkpoint. Then someone else made a different mistake and added another one. The checkpoints accumulate. The mistakes they were designed to prevent become rare. The latency becomes permanent.
Faster iteration cycles in field-state orgs
Average budget reallocation time in particle state
Of slow decisions are process problems, not analysis problems
API changes ship in hours. Standard decisions don't require committee review. Authority is distributed by design.
Squad model means most decisions never leave the team. Escalation is the exception, not the default.
33% family voting control since 2002. 894 executives in the org. Decisions travel through all of it before anything moves.
Merger integration locked leadership into quarterly budget cycles. Strategic calls take months to finalize.
Scoring: If most answers suggest fast, autonomous decision-making, score 1-3. If most answers suggest multi-layered approval and long timelines, score 7-10.