Dealing with the decision-making logjam

In my last article, I shared what senior leaders have told me they need and will make them pay attention when someone brings a new idea or request.

The focus there was on what teams can do to make the case more effectively in order to be clearer, earlier, better aligned, and easier to engage with and (hopefully) say yes to.

But that’s only half the picture, because even a well-prepared, well-timed case can still get stuck if the process or system it enters struggles to make decisions clearly and quickly.

And in my current conversations and work with leaders of organisations of all kinds, that’s exactly what keeps happening.

When I ask why, the answers are pretty consistent, I keep hearing versions of:

"There are a million things competing for my attention and I am overwhelmed"

This isn’t some silent or hidden crisis, it’s right on the surface.

Leaders are operating with attention that’s both scarce and over-subscribed - as Bilbo Baggins once said "I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread".

Cultural organisations are also often environments where decisions feel impossible unless an almost unrealistically high threshold of certainty is cleared.

And that combination creates an exhausting dyamic where even strong ideas can end up waiting months for engagement and progress, which in turn can cause a growing sense of frustration amongst those waiting for the decision to be made.

When attention becomes the bottleneck

Leaders often want visibility on most things, understandably, I was the same when I led teams and companies. But when that instinct collides with a calendar that's perpetually running at capacity, three things tend to happen - the backlog of unresolved choices grows, teams get frustrated, and leaders feel like they are permanently playing catch-up.

Over time, teams then feel unable to make any progress without escalation, while leaders end up feeling that everything depends on them.

This is less about individual capability and more about system design. 'Effective management' becomes extremely difficult in a context like this - which is a system designed around ideal attention rather than the reality of limited time, energy, and focus.

The organisational costs

The cost of this kind of logjam often shows up pretty quickly as four types of loss:

• Momentum loss: time-sensitive decisions and opportunities fade while waiting in the queue.
• Trust loss: teams stop believing that clarity or resolution will arrive when they need them.
• Talent loss: skilled staff disengage or leave because progress feels structurally impossible.
• Imagination loss: everyone spends more time and energy navigating permission rather than solving problems.

Even brilliant ideas can struggle to survive in a system where attention, authority, and timing are misaligned.