_Decision speed is a bottleneck that doesn't look like a bottleneck._ --- ## A category we don't see We're trained to spot bottlenecks. A process that's too slow, a team that's under-resourced, a dependency that's blocking progress. These are visible constraints. We have language for them. But there's another category that rarely gets named: decisions waiting to be made. A feature sits in limbo because someone needs to approve the scope. A campaign waits because pricing hasn't been signed off. A hire stalls because the role definition needs a final call. None of these look like bottlenecks. They look like... waiting. Normal. Part of how things work. Except weeks disappear. Something that could have taken a week takes a month. A month becomes a quarter. And nobody flags "decision pending" as the cause — because we don't think of decisions as a bottleneck category. --- ## The guessing tax The problem compounds when the criteria for decisions stay implicit. You know what you need to see before you'll say yes. Your team doesn't. So they guess. They put together a case based on what they think matters. It lands on your desk. It's not quite right — missing context, wrong framing, focused on the wrong risks. Now you need another round. Diaries realign in two weeks. The revised case comes back. Closer, but still not there. Another cycle. Each loop feels small. But stack them up and a decision that should have taken days has taken two months — not because anyone was slow, but because the criteria were never explicit. The team wasn't wrong to prepare what they prepared. They just didn't know what you actually needed. And you didn't know they didn't know, because the logic was so obvious to you that it felt like it didn't need saying. --- ## Start here Pick one decision you make repeatedly. Hiring, feature approval, pricing exceptions — something that comes across your desk regularly. Write down what you actually look for. Not what you think you should look for. What actually drives your yes or no. Share it with whoever prepares the case. The team prepares the right evidence first time. The decision happens in the meeting it was supposed to happen in. Eventually, some decisions don't need you at all — the criteria are clear enough that the team applies them directly. The bottleneck removes itself from the path. You might find it was never the process. It was the decision — and it was invisible until you named it. --- **Related:** [[Notes/From Data To Information|From Data to Information]] · [[Notes/How Decisions Compound|How Decisions Compound]] **See also:** [[Ideas/Theory of Constraints|Theory of Constraints]]