In a fast-growing organisation, the senior leadership team experienced increasing friction in cross-functional decision-making, particularly between commercial, product, and operations functions.
Key symptoms included:

• Repeated debates on the same topics across multiple leadership meetings
• Decisions being reopened after being “agreed”
• Escalations to the CEO for issues that should have been resolved at team level
• Delays in execution because teams waited for further clarification or validation

While leaders perceived the issue as “misalignment” or “communication problems”, the real cost was decision paralysis and slowed execution at scale.

• Decision Framing

Each strategic discussion started by defining Why a specific decision was being made

• Explicit Decision Criteria

Leaders were required to define and agree on decision criteria before evaluating options
Criteria included impact, risk, time-to-value, and organisational capacity

• Bias Awareness

Leaders were trained on common biases and encouraged to challenge assumptions rather than defend positions

• Decision Ownership & Guardrails

Clear ownership was assigned and documented for each decision

Through observation of leadership meetings and 1:1 conversations, a few consistent patterns emerged:

• Decisions were often discussed without a shared definition of the decision to be made
• Leaders relied heavily on intuition, seniority, or anecdotal evidence, leading to confirmation bias and authority bias
• Decisions were often recorded as discussion points rather than commitments, with no explicit owner, next steps, or success criteria defined
• Decision documentation was inconsistent, making it difficult for teams outside the room to understand what had been decided, why it had been decided

This resulted in over-involvement, emotional debates, and a lack of ownership once decisions were made

A Real Life Case from Expert's Experience

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