The Decision System That Holds

The meeting finally feels different.

The numbers behave. Nobody’s arguing about which report is “right.” Definitions aren’t shifting underfoot. The trend line is clean. A leader asks a sharp question and the answer comes back fast.

Then comes the pause.

Not a dramatic pause. A familiar one. One that shows up when the organization has clarity but not conviction. When everyone agrees, and you can still feel the weight in the room because agreement has never been the hard part. The hard part is what happens next.

I was inspired to write this series because I kept seeing the same thing in good organizations with smart people.

They weren’t struggling to make decisions.

They were struggling to make decisions that could survive a real week.

An exception shows up. A handoff goes sideways. A new leader joins the call. A customer escalates. A plant goes down. The “clear decision” turns back into a discussion. Not because anyone is irresponsible. Because the decision was never built to hold under pressure.

That’s what I mean by durability.

A decision system holds when that decision still routes work the same way three weeks from now, even after the first exception tests it, even after the first handoff stresses it, even after the people in the room change.

That’s the thesis. Plain and uncomfortable.

A decision isn’t done when we agree.

A decision is done when the work changes, and keeps changing in the same direction even when nobody is watching.

If you’ve been following this series, you know we didn’t start with governance councils or policy binders. We started where the cost shows up.

We started with boundaries because permission chaos quietly kills execution. If people don’t know what they’re allowed to decide, they hesitate. Or they guess. Or they escalate everything to avoid getting surprised later. Leaders get dragged into choices they shouldn’t be making. Teams get burned for choices they thought they were allowed to make. The whole machine slows down, not from incompetence, but from self-protection.

Boundaries aren’t control. They’re protection.

They make seams explicit. They tell the team, “You own this space. Move. When you hit this line, route it.” That single design choice is the difference between autonomy and drift. It gives the power to the right folks at the right times.

Then we moved to escalation design because drift is inevitable. Variation is normal. Exceptions will happen. The question is whether your organization treats those moments like a personal failure or like a designed path.

Most places escalate emotionally. Whoever feels the most heat speaks the loudest. The organization confuses urgency with impact, and escalation becomes a political event instead of a mechanical step.

Designed escalation replaces that with something calmer and sharper. A trigger tied to measurable impact. A known ladder. A timebox. Closure rules.

This is also where decision-making conversations get real. Not in a leadership offsite. It's in the messy middle where the system either supports good judgment or punishes it. Harvard Business Review made the point directly:

"...systems can support good decision-making or quietly undermine it. When the system is inconsistent, indecision starts to look like safety."  

Even with good boundaries and clean escalation paths, you can still lose if decisions don’t stay usable.

That’s why Decision Memory mattered.

It’s not that people forget. It’s that organizations don’t make decisions portable.

A decision that lives in someone’s head, or in a slide deck nobody can find, isn’t really a decision. It’s a rumor with authority.

So memory isn’t documentation. It is retrieval.

When the decision comes back, do people ask a person, or do they pull a record?

If the answer is “we ask Tom,” you don’t have a system yet. You have heroes. And heroes are expensive. They burn out. They become bottlenecks. They leave. Then the organization re-decides everything because it can’t inherit the context.

Memory also needs a half-life. If you don’t design expiration and reopen triggers, memory becomes a museum. People stop trusting it because it’s stale, bloated, and nobody knows what still matters.

Then we reached the capstone: reinforcement.

This is where most transformations quietly stall. You decide. Everyone nods. The meeting ends.

And nothing changes.

Not because people are lazy. Not because leaders don’t care. Because the organization never absorbed the decision into the workflow. The decision stayed trapped as intent.

Reinforcement is the bridge between decision and default behavior.

It’s boring on purpose. It’s also where the “system” becomes visible in the work.

It looks like changing the intake form so an exception can’t sneak in unclassified. It looks like a Jira condition that blocks the wrong class of request from entering the wrong lane. It looks like an escalation that cannot close without a record, an owner by role, and an expiration date. It looks like making the reopen trigger non-optional so “we should revisit this” stops being a feeling and becomes a measurable condition.

McKinsey & Company frames the same underlying truth from a different angle:

"...decision speed and decision quality only matter if the organization can sustain them, meaning the behavior repeats, not just the conversation."  

So if you want to tell whether your decisions are durable or just well-intentioned, use this. No ceremony. No workshop. Just honesty.

Decision Durability Checklist:

• When a decision resurfaces, we can retrieve the record in under one minute.
• Exceptions are classified by boundary, not argued from scratch.
• Escalation triggers are measurable, not emotional.
• Escalations have a known ladder and a timebox.
• Every escalation closes with an owner (role), a next action, and an expiration.
• Decisions have reopen triggers, so “revisit this” means something concrete.
• At least one workflow element changes after a decision (intake, template, checklist, routing, definition).
• New leaders inherit context, not just outcomes.

If three or more are red, don’t start with culture. Start with one decision and redesign the path. Culture follows what the work makes normal.

And if you take one line out of this series, take this one:

If a decision needs reminding, it wasn’t reinforced.

Here’s the 30-day field test I’d run with any team that wants this to be real.

1. Pick one recurring decision you keep re-deciding. Not the flashiest one. The one that quietly drains momentum.
2. Write a boundary for it in plain language. One sentence for what’s in. One sentence for what’s out.
3. Define an escalation trigger in measurable terms. Cost, risk, customer impact, time, compliance exposure. Something you can defend when the room gets political.
4. Set a simple escalation SLA. Who gets pulled in, in what order, by when.
5. Require a decision record before closure. If it isn’t recorded, it didn’t finish.
6. Embed one workflow change. One. A required field. A gating rule. A template update. A runbook line. Something small that forces the future to behave differently.
7. Then run a 10-minute weekly review for four weeks. Tighten the boundary. Tune the trigger. Retire what’s stale. Make the record easier to find.

That’s reinforcement. That’s how you stop needing heroes.

And here’s what “durable” looks like in the wild.

A new leader joins the call. An exception shows up. The room doesn’t debate from scratch. Somebody drops the record into the thread. The boundary clarifies what’s in and what’s out. The trigger tells you whether it escalates. The ladder routes it. The timebox holds it. The decision closes with a next action and an expiration.

No drama. No relitigation. No heroics.

Just work that moves the same way, even when the people change.

That’s a decision system that holds.

You know it's coming...

What’s one decision your team keeps re-deciding, and which part is failing you right now: boundaries, escalation, memory, or reinforcement?

Sources

Aminov, I., De Smet, A., Jost, G., & Mendelsohn, D. (2019, April 30). Decision making in the age of urgency. McKinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/decision-making-in-the-age-of-urgency

Carucci, R. (2020, February 4). How systems support (or undermine) good decision-making. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2020/02/how-systems-support-or-undermine-good-decision-making

Hughes, J., Maxwell, J. R., & Weiss, L. (2020, September 14). Reimagine decision making to improve speed and quality. McKinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/the-organization-blog/reimagine-decision-making-to-improve-speed-and-quality

Bain & Company. (n.d.). RAPID® decision making framework. Retrieved January 31, 2026, from https://www.bain.com/insights/rapid-decision-making/