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The Slowest Process in the Company Is One Simple Question

Several people sit at a long table in a glass-walled meeting room overlooking the city.

The slowest process in a company is not the next IT change request. Nor the month-end close. It is answering a simple what-if question from the board.

Many steering processes are stuck somewhere between Excel and classical planning tools. Excel works until it gets too complex. Planning tools work until someone asks a spontaneous question, because they are built for procedures, not for ad-hoc thinking.

That is exactly where things slow down. Boards usually ask spontaneously, and standard processes rarely keep up.

A driver-based simulation model shifts this. You can play through what might happen at the speed the question is asked.

From more than ten years of project work around scenario simulation I take away three observations. Board questions can be simulated in the meeting itself. One scenario easily becomes five in the same time. And in planning itself, effort typically drops by 30 to 50 percent.

None of this is about tools. It is about how fast a company can think, react and decide.

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