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The Costliest Decisions Are Rarely the Wrong Ones
The costliest decisions in companies are rarely the wrong ones. They are the ones that arrive too late.
Steering processes contain a great deal of protection against wrong decisions: committees, alignment loops, detailed analysis. Against slow decisions there is remarkably little.
Yet a wrong decision can usually be corrected if you notice early that it was wrong. A missed decision can rarely be recovered, because the market has moved on and the window has closed.
From my consulting years I think of a CFO who waited for the final, watertight analysis while a competitor had long since reacted. The number was correct in the end. It did him little good.
The question of whether the number is right matters. The question of whether you can decide in time matters more.
A scenario that arrives in two days and gets the direction right beats the perfect analysis that takes three weeks. Yet most steering processes optimise for accuracy.