How can leaders speed up decisions and delivery without creating chaos?

Speed is not only a matter of urgency. It depends on whether leaders create the clarity, decision rights, and follow-through that help people turn decisions into action.

Most organizations do not lack ambition. They don’t lack capable people, resources, technology, or strategic intent. Yet, when it comes to execution, progress can still feel sluggish. 

A leadership team agrees that a priority matters, but the next step requires another meeting. A project team develops a strong recommendation, but waits for approval from several stakeholders. A regional team sees an opportunity but is unsure whether the decision sits locally, centrally, or somewhere in between. Often, by the time the organization is ready to act, the opportunity has changed. 

This is one of the hidden costs of unclear decision-making. According to McKinsey, executives spend nearly 40% of their time making decisions, and many believe much of that time is poorly used. Decision-making isn’t a small operational detail. It’s a major use of leadership capacity, and when it becomes slow, repetitive, or unclear, it can drain momentum across the organization. 

Yet the pressure to move faster is increasing. Deloitte’s 2026 Global Human Capital Trends report found that 7 in 10 business leaders say their primary competitive strategy over the next three years is to be fast and nimble. Leaders are being asked to respond more quickly to changing market conditions, customer needs, workforce expectations, and technology shifts. 

Dimitris Papanikitopoulos, Managing Partner at Signium in Athens, says,

“The challenge is that speed can’t be achieved simply by telling people to move faster. Pressure might create activity, but it doesn’t necessarily drive progress. In some cases, it can make decision-making harder, as teams rush without alignment, escalate too much, or avoid decisions altogether because the consequences of being wrong feel too high.” 

So, what leadership moves actually help organizations make better decisions, faster, and carry them through? 

Why do organizations move slowly when people are working hard?  

Organizations often move slowly because decisions get caught in unclear authority and hesitation about what teams are allowed to do – not through lack of effort. Fast organizations are shaped by leaders who remove this friction and make it easier for people to act with confidence.  

When leaders see speed as a matter of personal drive, they may try to accelerate execution by increasing pressure: more frequent check-ins, tighter deadlines, stronger language about urgency, or more direct involvement from the top. These actions may be necessary at times, but they don’t solve the deeper problem if the organization remains unclear about who decides, what matters most, and when a decision is ready to be acted on.  

This shows up in several ways:  

• Decisions move upward because authority is unclear.  

• Teams over-consult because they don’t know whose input is essential.  

• Senior leaders revisit decisions because the original agreement wasn’t specific enough or because circumstances changed before action was taken.  

• Managers may delay action when the safest career move is to avoid mistakes, rather than test ideas and learn from them.  

“This is why speed should be treated as a leadership design issue,” says Papanikitopoulos. “Where does execution get stuck? Where are too many people involved? Where are teams waiting for permission they should already have? Good governance shouldn’t slow progress down. It should help strike a balance, where the right decisions move at the right pace, with the right level of oversight.”  

How can leaders make decision-making faster without creating chaos?  

There is no single mechanism that makes decision-making faster. Leaders create speed by making decisions easier to understand, easier to own, easier to act on, and easier to adjust when conditions change. In practice, this means leaders should pay close attention to removing the friction that slows decisions down.  

1. Clarify objectives before asking people to act 

Teams move faster when they understand what they’re trying to achieve and what the organization’s shared priorities are. Leaders may communicate urgency, but still leave the real trade-offs unclear. Should the team prioritize speed, cost, quality, customer impact, or risk reduction? Where is there room to test? What needs to be escalated? 

Papanikitopoulos explains: “When these questions go unanswered, people often default to caution. They ask for more input, prepare more analysis, or wait for senior confirmation. Leaders can reduce this hesitation by making the goal and boundaries clearer. This helps teams understand where they have room to act, and how to make sensible decisions without waiting for permission.” 

2. Put decision rights close enough to the work 

Many organizations say they want empowered teams. Fewer make it clear what those teams are actually allowed to decide. When decision rights are vague, important decisions drift upward and, as a result, teams wait for approval, decisions are reopened, and accountability becomes blurred. 

Leaders can speed this up by defining decision rights:  

• Who owns the decision 

• Who gives input 

• Who needs to be informed 

• What must be escalated upward  

“This doesn’t need to become bureaucratic,” says Papanikitopoulos. “In many cases, a simple decision framework is enough to make sure decisions are made at the right level, with the right oversight.” 

3. Reduce the weight of each decision  

Decision-making often slows down because people are trying to process too much at once. There may be too many options, too many stakeholders, too much information, or too many questions being treated as equally important. Instead of improving the decision, the sheer cognitive load creates hesitation and delay. 

Leaders can help by simplifying the decision environment. What decision are we actually making? What information is essential? Who really needs to be involved? Is this a major decision, a reversible decision, or something that can be tested? 

The aim is to help teams work through complexity without becoming stuck in every possible detail.  

4. Know when to decide and when to test  

Some decisions take time because leaders try to eliminate all uncertainty before taking action. In complex markets, that’s rarely possible. Some decisions do require deep review, while others can be tested through pilots, small experiments, customer sampling, or short learning cycles.  

Papanikitopoulos emphasizes this: “Treating every decision as irreversible slows the organization down. Treating every decision as an experiment creates risk. The key is to give teams room to test within clear boundaries, learn quickly, and adjust before too much time or money has been committed.” 

5. Align rewards with responsible progress 

Decision-making is shaped by what the organization rewards. A company may say it wants speed, but reward leaders for avoiding visible mistakes. It may encourage collaboration, but it measures people only on functional results. It may ask for innovation, but penalize failed experiments as poor performance. 

When caution is safer than ownership, caution will win. Leaders need to look at whether metrics and incentives support the behavior the organization says it wants. Speed becomes more sustainable when people are rewarded for responsible progress, not only for avoiding mistakes. 

6. Make decisions turn into action 

In many organizations, decisions appear to be made in meetings but then fail to translate into action. People leave with different interpretations, ownership is unclear, or another stakeholder later raises a concern that was not addressed. The same issue then returns weeks later, under a slightly different heading. 

Once a decision is made, people should know what was agreed, who owns the next step, what happens next, and what would justify reopening the decision. “This doesn’t mean leaders can never change course,” adds Papanikitopoulos. “Good decision-making includes learning and adjustment. But there’s a difference between changing direction because new information has emerged and revisiting a decision because no one was quite clear on what had been decided.”  

What can leaders learn from Amazon’s one-way and two-way door decisions? 

Amazon offers a useful example of how leaders can speed up decision-making by assigning different levels of weight to different decisions. 

In his 2015 shareholder letter, Jeff Bezos described two types of decisions. Some are consequential and difficult to reverse. He called these “one-way door” decisions because once the organization has moved through them, it’s difficult to go back. These decisions need deeper thought, careful consultation, and a slower process. Other decisions are more reversible. These “two-way door” decisions can be changed if needed, so they should not be slowed down by the same level of process. 

The useful lesson is that not every decision carries the same weight. When leaders treat every decision as high-risk, they slow the organization down. When they treat every decision as reversible, they create unnecessary risk. 

This distinction remains relevant at Amazon today. In a 2025 Harvard Business Review interview, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy described how Amazon tries to keep operating like “the world’s largest startup” by giving people responsibility for many “two-way door” decisions – decisions that can be reversed if needed.  

For other leaders, the practical question is simple: which decisions need careful deliberation, and which decisions can move faster because the organization can learn, adjust, or reverse course? Speed improves when leaders help teams understand the difference. 

What does this mean for CEOs, boards, and talent leaders? 

The way decisions move through an organization is not only an operational issue. It is also a leadership, governance, and talent issue. 

For CEOs: decision speed is not personal control 

For CEOs, the challenge is not to become the decision-maker for everything. When too many decisions depend on the CEO or a small executive group, the organization may appear controlled, but become increasingly slow. 

The CEO’s role is to create the conditions for the right decisions to be made at the right level. This includes:  

• Clarifying strategic intent 

• Setting non-negotiables 

• Building trust in senior leaders 

• Ensuring that governance supports movement rather than constant escalation 

For boards: decision flow is a signal of leadership health 

For boards, slow decision-making can be an important warning sign. If decisions are often unclear, overly centralized, or repeatedly reopened, the issue may not be the decision itself, but the way the leadership team is working.  

“For boards, the question is not only whether the organization has chosen the right strategy,” says Papanikitopoulos. “It’s whether the leadership team is clear enough on ownership, priorities and next steps to turn that strategy into action.”  

For talent leaders: decision-making should be part of leadership assessment 

For talent leaders, decision-making should be part of how senior leaders are assessed, developed, and onboarded. 

This means assessing decision-making as a leadership capability, not only as a personal strength. The question is whether senior leaders know how to build decision-making capacity around them: setting clear decision rights, developing accountability, handling trade-offs, and giving teams the confidence to act. 

It also matters during onboarding. New executives shouldn’t be left to guess how decisions are actually made. Clear decision norms can help them understand where authority sits, when escalation is expected, and how disagreement should be handled. 

Speed comes from clarity, not pressure 

Most organizations want to move faster, but the question is whether they can do so without relying on constant pressure from the top. 

Papanikitopoulos adds, “When speed depends on senior leaders chasing every decision, momentum becomes fragile. People might move quickly for a while, but the organization has not necessarily become faster. It has simply become more dependent on intervention, which is difficult to sustain.” 

This is what makes decision-making a leadership issue, not only a process issue. Speed without alignment creates chaos. Alignment without action creates drag. The leadership task is to build a decision-making environment that gives people the confidence to move quickly, responsibly, and together.