Decision Fog

Have you ever watched a simple decision—one that should take minutes—stretch across emails, meetings, and approvals? What felt clear in conversation fades in the follow-up, and before long, no one is sure who’s actually deciding.

Small businesses often pride themselves on speed, but as headcount grows, choices that once took an afternoon now stretch into weeks. A Bain study found that organizations lose significant value when decisions are pushed down without clarity or pushed up without context, creating cycles of delay (Bain, 2024).

Decision fog is not the absence of choices but the blurring of them. Leaders announce priorities without resources. Teams float proposals that die quietly in an inbox. Decisions get revisited because the first call was never definitive. Each delay feels small; together, they slow execution to a crawl and erode trust in leadership.

As companies scale, the number of stakeholders and interdependencies grows. Each new layer adds more potential points of hesitation. Harvard Business Review notes that more than half of managers say unclear decision rights are their largest barrier to execution (Harvard Business Review, 2023). What began as quick, informal judgment calls now requires alignment, documentation, and approval. The speed that once defined the culture begins to fade.

From the top, this fog looks like caution. Leaders assume the team is gathering input or being thorough. From the middle, it feels like risk: no one wants to make a call that might be overruled. And for front-line staff, it feels like waiting. Work sits idle while emails circulate and meetings reschedule. Over time, initiative gives way to self-protection. People stop deciding for fear of deciding wrong. The organization slows not from lack of effort, but from lack of permission.

When this hesitation becomes habitual, even small actions demand consensus. A marketing headline requires a meeting; an operations tweak needs a committee. Every decision seems to require validation from somewhere else. The irony is that the intent is almost always good—leaders want inclusion, managers want alignment—but the result is paralysis disguised as collaboration.

How Decision Fog Shows Up

1. Blurry Ownership
In small teams, who decides is usually obvious. As organizations grow, roles overlap and authority becomes diffuse. When accountability is shared, no one feels responsible. Issues escalate higher than necessary or stall altogether because the person best positioned to act isn’t sure it’s their call.

2. Consensus Theater
Collaboration can easily tip into performance. Meetings multiply in the name of inclusion, but real authority remains unclear. When everyone has a say but no one has the say, decisions circle without closure. What feels like alignment is often just delay by another name.

3. Reopened Calls
Decisions made without clear owners or firm boundaries rarely stay settled. Projects reverse course midstream as priorities shift or new voices weigh in. Revisiting old choices consumes scarce bandwidth and signals to teams that no answer is final. Over time, confidence in leadership weakens.

Why It Matters

Decision fog slows organizations in ways that metrics rarely capture. Projects extend, approvals pile up, and opportunities slip while teams wait for clarity that never quite arrives. The immediate cost is time; the deeper cost is conviction. When people no longer trust that decisions will hold, initiative dries up.

Over time, decision fog changes culture. Teams grow cautious, leaders become gatekeepers, and energy that once went into execution shifts to self-justification. Effort is spent documenting choices rather than making them. Momentum fades not through failure but fatigue—the slow erosion of confidence that the organization can act quickly and stand by its calls.

Left unchecked, the system becomes self-reinforcing: decisions move slower precisely because they are handled by those furthest from the work.

Seeing Through the Fog

Decision fog rarely announces itself. It settles in quietly, in tentative emails and half-decided priorities. Once named, it explains a great deal: why capable teams hesitate, why meetings multiply, and why progress feels like moving through mist.

From inside the system, these patterns feel normal—legitimate caution, inclusive process, healthy debate. From outside, they read differently: blurred decision rights, recursive approvals, authority that wanders. The same facts change meaning depending on vantage point.

The work, then, is to create the distance needed to see clearly again and implement simple, repeatable systems. When decision paths are made visible—when it’s plain who decides, and when a call is final—momentum returns without sacrificing inclusion. Clarity restores speed not by demanding urgency, but by allowing people to move with confidence.

Time Drift

Are you like most of us, constantly looking at your calendar and asking, “How is it already Thursday?” The week seems to vanish into meetings, check-ins, and catch-ups. By the time you sit down to tackle the real work, the day and the week are already half gone.

As companies grow past ten employees, leaders begin to spend more of their week in coordination activities—meetings, check-ins, status updates, project reviews. Research shows executives now spend about 23 hours a week in meetings, up from less than 10 hours in the 1960s (Harvard Business Review, 2023).

Time drift is the gradual diversion of attention from productive work to managing the work. The symptoms are familiar: back-to-back meetings, scattered Slack threads, and the sense that by lunchtime the day’s energy has already been spent. No single meeting sinks a business, but the cumulative leak is costly.

Unlike crises that announce themselves in big numbers or major failures, time drift is subtle. It accumulates in five-minute delays, in tasks that take two meetings instead of one, in software log-ins that don’t connect the first try. These moments feel too small to matter, but their aggregate effect is decisive. The company feels like it is running harder to stay in the same place because, in truth, the available hours are eroding.

How Time Drift Shows Up

1. Meeting Creep. The most visible form of time drift is the steady expansion of meetings. What began as a quick weekly touchpoint becomes a standing ritual of multiple hours. Attendance grows “just in case,” and agendas stretch to cover what was missed last time. Meetings stack into a self-sustaining ecosystem, consuming the best hours of the week. By midweek, calendars are blocked wall to wall, leaving little room for concentrated work.

2. Leadership Interruption. Owners and executives experience time drift in its sharpest form: the fractured calendar. Instead of devoting long blocks to strategy, leaders are pulled into a chain of ad hoc requests—clarifications, approvals, quick judgments. Each feels urgent, but the cumulative effect is erosion. The leader’s schedule becomes a patchwork of firefighting, and long-term thinking is squeezed to the margins.

3. Hidden Queues. Perhaps the least visible driver of time drift is waiting. Work piles up in invisible queues while awaiting sign-offs, missing context, or forgotten follow-ups. Staff may be diligent, but projects stall not because of slow effort, but because of idle time. Unlike missed deadlines, queues are silent—they don’t announce themselves until momentum is already lost.

Why It Matters

Time drift reshapes the workweek from focused to fragmented. Staff report being constantly in motion but rarely effective. Leaders find that their best hours are consumed by coordination and interruptions rather than moving the business forward. Projects extend, not because tasks are complex, but because the available hours have been eaten away.

What makes time drift dangerous is not its size but its silence. It does not show up on financial statements or dashboards. It shows up in fatigue, in projects that stretch on, and in the creeping sense that the company is sprinting hard just to stay in place.

Naming the pattern is the first step to seeing it. Once visible, time drift explains why busy weeks yield so little progress. For small and medium businesses, recognizing time drift is not about reclaiming minutes—it is about regaining the clock itself.