Ep 22 - Mastering the 3 Pillars of Decision Velocity
Impactful Conversations with Dr Glenn Wallis and Nejmi Alexander
Key takeaways
Glenn defines decision velocity as a function of three pillars - clarity, commitment and speed - and stresses that the goal is the right speed for each decision, which may be genuinely slow, not maximum speed for every decision.
Glenn's observation from coaching is that geopolitical uncertainty, such as the tariff conversations of mid-last-year, slowed decision-making inside organisations: low clarity pulls more people into the process, and consensus-building makes decisions take longer.
Glenn identifies three common traps that stall senior leaders: activism (cracking on before achieving clarity), insufficient strategic scoping (failing to "look up and out" at who is impacted and why the decision arrived), and personal traits and biases such as low confidence or over-individualism.
Nejmi argues that clarity is the biggest derailer: once a leader properly understands what the decision is and whether it truly sits with them, the right speed and commitment tend to follow - and in a binary choice, 51% of the information is conceptually enough to decide, with diminishing returns beyond it.
Together the hosts offer five practical tools: saturation (Glenn), the 80/20 rule (Nejmi), a self-imposed time limit (Glenn), fear setting (Nejmi), and categorising decisions as reversible or irreversible before engaging (Glenn).
Episode summary
How do leaders make decisions at the right speed? Nejmi and Glenn's answer: decision velocity is a function of clarity, commitment and speed - judged decision by decision, not maximised across all of them. They diagnose the traps that stall leaders, from activism to risk aversion, and share five practical tools, from saturation and the 80/20 rule to fear setting and the reversible-versus-irreversible test.
Why is decision velocity a real challenge right now?
Glenn: Hello and welcome to the Impactful Conversations podcast with me, Dr Glenn Wallis, and my very dear friend and co-host, Nejmi Alexander. Nejmi, hi mate, how are you?
Nejmi: I am very well, thank you, Glenn - looking forward to getting into this idea of decision velocity.
Glenn: Me too. One of the reasons we're looking at the speed and rate at which decisions are made in organisations is because it seems a very real challenge for the leaders we're talking with inside the organisations we liaise with on a regular basis. There seems to be pressure on individual leaders to make decisions, and there seems to be frustration about the pace at which decisions either are or aren't made by different levels of the organisation. So it's a real thing. And rather than this being about the tactics or the technical ways of making a decision, it's about looking broadly at what's the right speed for decisions to be made, bearing in mind the context in which they're being played out - and how you do that in a way that mitigates risk, but also gets decisions made and completed in a reasonable timeframe. When we're coaching individual leaders, that's very much where the centre of gravity of those conversations seems to be.
Nejmi: A couple of ideas come to mind - we haven't defined it yet, and we'll get into defining it - around where this becomes really tangible, where people might relate to it. Certainly for me, this idea of urgency: in leadership, to a person, there's a high degree of pace and urgency that people are typically working towards. What relationship does that have to this system of decision velocity within an organisation, or within your context? And also uncertainty: when we're experiencing uncertainty - AI uncertainty, geopolitical uncertainty - that can have an impact on this dynamic of feeling an urgency or need to make decisions, or to operate with velocity. But sometimes that can be a frustration, because things do not move quickly.
Glenn: 100%. As you and I were saying before we came on air, I've spoken with tens of leaders even since the start of this year, and reflecting on last year, many of them would say that the uncertainty in the geopolitical situation in the middle of last year, with the tariff conversations going on globally, meant that decision-making slowed down inside organisations. Part of the reason for that slowdown is that, to your point, the lack of clarity made those decisions harder to make. Not only that, but you then wrap more people into the decision-making process. So A, you've got more resource being drawn into making the decision - and a byproduct of that is that those decisions often take longer too, because you've got to get consensus. There are so many elements that play through to the velocity with which a decision can be made, some of them outside people's control. What we're trying to do today is help individual leaders think about how they keep decision velocity at the right rate for the decision that needs to be made, and what sorts of things they might need to consider.
Nejmi: Nice. So there are external factors that can have an impact, and we recognise some of the symptoms and frustrations those can cause. But for a leader, this idea of decision velocity is about looking at the things that are controllable - the things you can be intentional around in order to drive things forward at the right pace, without creating or feeding into the chaos, the lack of clarity, or any of those byproducts that appear when decision velocity isn't operating at the right pace.
Glenn: Yeah - and the flip side is, if you get that right more often than you don't, there's a strategic advantage, a competitive advantage to doing that. You can make the right decision, more often, at the right pace, and that will translate into competitive advantage. Who's not interested in that? So there are real upsides - plural, probably - to being able to do this well.
What are the three pillars of decision velocity?
Nejmi: Okay - so it feels like maybe we've defined it, but for clarity: what do we mean when we say decision velocity? What are the different components to be aware of as a leader?
Glenn: I think decision velocity is a function of clarity; commitment to the decision itself, because that impacts engagement in the discussion, or the governance element of it, maybe; and then the speed with which you're willing to act, or to compute all the different variables in order to make the decision. So speed, clarity and commitment would give you the relevant velocity that a decision is going to be made through, I guess, that lens.
Nejmi: Got it. Just to make sure I'm on the right page: when we talk about speed, clarity and commitment, what we're saying is that as a leader, in any given context or for any given decision that's required, it's important to be intentional around how you either create those components in your context or react to them, to ensure you're making a decision at the right speed for whatever the situation is. If it's something that requires more engagement, more time, more people involved, you're making the right judgment call around that. Or the converse: if it sits at your level and it's within your gift to decide, you can move quite quickly - making a savvy, sound judgment about the speed at which the decision could be made; the clarity to ensure whoever needs to be involved is involved, to the extent that everybody's clear on their input and clear on the decision, so they can act in accordance with it; and then the commitment idea - that you've got the right people in the room to agree and get behind whatever the decision is, so they can go and do their part to turn that decision into action. When you can get those three things right, and you're judging that correctly, you create less of the byproduct of not getting it right. Is that right?
Glenn: Exactly. And those byproducts would be decision-making that's too slow, or where you've made the wrong decision about the decision. It lends itself to higher-quality decision-making at the right speed - and the right speed might be really slow, by the way. We don't want people to go away with the idea that every decision has to be made faster. That's definitely not what we're saying. It's the right speed for the right decision.
We've worked with leaders - we talked about it offline, so I know we have - who seem to be paralysed around key decisions. Well, that's what you're being paid for. Part of what you're paid for is to make tough calls. Or we know leaders who always want a team around them to make decisions - and decision-making by committee is really important in some contexts, and really not in others. If your default is always to go to the committee, you're probably slowing things down. Versus the sort of hero-leader model - "I know what the right choices are, and I've made the decision" - where you've not engaged enough people. When we work with leaders and ask them to reflect on their decision-making style, very often that's a real eye-opener for them: whether I ask everybody to help me make decisions because I lack confidence, or whether I'm not very good at engaging people and have relatively low EQ, so I don't tend to engage enough people. I'm just giving some real examples of how that plays through. Get it right, though, and personally your own leadership career goes up - but so does that competitive advantage we spoke about earlier on.
Nejmi: What comes to life for me around this idea is that there's very much the individual lens - exactly what you just described: how do I interpret where I have authority? How do I take risks sometimes and just make the decision where it's necessary? Or, where it sits above my authority, how well and effectively do I gain influence or create engagement with the things I need to drive forward? All those things around personal leadership, which can show up in a whole variety of different ways - driving through change, being able to deliver on your outcomes, just operating at the right pace. But then there's also the contextual lens, the environmental lens: how hierarchical is the organisation? How effectively does authority get delegated through the organisation, or not? Sometimes there's a facade of that, and what one person thought was their decision is not really their decision. That can also play its part in slowing down decision velocity, or in not getting it right consistently. On the individual side of things, where do you feel leaders can sometimes get stuck around that framework we've described - speed, clarity and commitment?
Where do leaders get stuck when making decisions?
Glenn: There are several, but top of mind there are two or three things we see quite regularly when we coach very senior leaders. One is that they're activists - they want to crack on before they've got all the details to hand. The clarity piece isn't where it needs to be, so they'll start doing things - and there could be a limitless number of what those things are - around the decision: maybe starting to gather people before they've really understood what the decision requires of them, or even what the decision to be made actually is. So the tendency to act is one trap leaders can definitely fall into.
The second is not being strategic enough. You take the material you've got to make the decision on at face value, and that's it - you don't do enough scoping of the landscape to see what type of decision this is: who's going to be impacted by it, where has the information or the request for the decision come from, what might their motivations be. Leaders who are very inward-looking, but don't look up and out sufficiently frequently to have enough of the relevant data. I'm not a fan of "gather all the data all the time", because not all decisions need that - but I do honestly think that because people are often so busy, they don't look up and out often enough.
And then - I've hinted at it already - there are personal biases or personal traits that can get in the way of making the right decision at the right speed. Things like lack of confidence; being a bit too individualistic and not collaborative enough; that idea that you're impersonating a leader rather than being a real leader. So, off the top of my head, three things that are pretty common: personal traits and biases; not looking up and out enough; and often just cracking on before you've really got all the detail you need.
Why is clarity the biggest derailer?
Nejmi: I think that's absolutely bang on. For me, the biggest trap - the one I come across most often - is in that clarity bucket: not getting the full picture before moving forward, or not fully understanding the different interests at play that can derail a decision. If you go ahead without having got the right clarity around the decision itself, effectively you could be creating a lot more activity around the task - re-engaging stakeholders, solving for political storms, S storms or other otherwise described storms; that can happen around trying to reverse a decision once it's been made. So think of it from a risk perspective: not getting that clarity upfront - around what the decision is, whether the decision truly sits with you, and who needs to contribute to the thinking - that for me is the biggest derailer. The speed at which the decision can be made, in my mind, is a function of that: once you properly understand it, you can make decisions at the right speed. And the commitment around the decision tends to find itself at the right level once the other two components are present. I feel like that's an easier bit to solve.
Glenn: That's really good - because something you've just sparked for me, around the commitment piece, is that once leaders have made a decision, you've got to back yourself, haven't you? You've got to commit to that decision. You can't go half-hearted at it once the decision has been made - I think it sends all the wrong messages to people, certainly if you're part-way through it and humming and ahhing about it, or trying to shed the blame if the wheels look like they're going to come off. No - that's the role of a leader. Sometimes you'll get those decisions wrong. One thing that should be true from the outputs of this conversation: there's no guarantee that the decision you've made is right. It's just - was it the best decision you could make, at the right speed? And once you've made it, commit to it. If it was the right one, you've got more chance of it turning out okay. If you're prevaricating around the edges and not committing, that sends all the wrong messages - and, I suppose you could argue, it becomes a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
How much information is enough to decide?
Nejmi: It's really fascinating, isn't it? Within the idea of having all the data - I come across this often with clients who are maybe more risk-averse, in their personality style or their appetite for risk, but find themselves in leadership situations - or any situation, really - where you're required to make a decision without the full picture or the full data set. Which is all the time, because none of us can predict the future. When that's the case, we can over-index on a desire to slow things down in order to get more information, with the intent that more information will make you feel more comfortable taking a risk. Actually, your comfort levels around taking that risk probably won't shift - it will just slightly increase the probability of you making the right decision. From a purely hypothetical standpoint, if there are two options to choose between, you only need 51% of the data, or the insight, conceptually, for it to tip in one direction - and then that is the right decision with the information you had at hand. Now, that won't make you feel comfortable taking the risk, but you're not going to get better. You might get 5 to 10% more of the data by slowing things down, but it's not going to swing it the other way.
Glenn: No - and the danger is that you're then moving at the wrong speed. You've got greater clarity, but you're working at the wrong speed, so you haven't got the right decision velocity.
It reminds me - if we move into some practical tools for leaders, to help with choosing the right speed at the right time - of when I was doing my doctoral studies. As is true of all degree-type theses, we had to do a literature review, and the guidance was that you do your literature review until you reach a point referred to as saturation. What that meant is: you continue to read all the time that fresh information is coming up. When you find that mostly you're rereading things you've already read or are already aware of, you've reached saturation, and you've probably done as deep a dive into the literature as is needed. I'm not suggesting people go to those lengths, certainly not with all decisions, but I do think that's a useful guide - that idea of saturation. Have I got all the information, and am I largely not finding anything new? There are always going to be outliers, there's always going to be new information coming forward, but at some point you've got to say: I've got a deadline for this decision - have I reached as much saturation as I can get for this decision in that time? I've used that a lot in my career, I have to say. It probably means, if anything, I've made decisions slightly more slowly than would be ideal - but it's always given me the confidence of knowing I had as much information as I could find in the context. I hope that's a useful tool for people, that idea of saturation.
Nejmi: I love that. It makes me think of the Pareto principle, from my own background - the 80/20 rule, brought in from the other end of the spectrum. You will likely have achieved 80% of the insight from the first 20% of the time. The remaining effort can, of course, increase your insight and increase your confidence, but you've got significantly diminishing returns on all the time that follows that first initial tranche - that high-level analysis, or whatever it might be. So if you're operating at pace, ask yourself: what is the 20%? Set yourself a mental model for the first 20% of information you could gather around this decision - do I need to know the first order of magnitude? And then decide beyond that.
Glenn: I love that. Linked to that, another tool would be to put a self-imposed time limit on it. I'm going to give 48 hours to make the decision, or maybe 24 hours to find the information I need. Again, that will depend on context, and it will depend on the scale of the decision - but choose the right timeline, and don't make it endless. Because to your point, if you're largely going to find 80% of what you need in the first 20%, I would make it shorter rather than longer, definitely. So we've got saturation on one end, we've got the 80/20 rule on another, and we've got the 48-hour rule - let's call it that, but you can make the time whatever feels right for the decision itself. Any other tactics for people to think about?
How does fear setting unblock stalled decisions?
Nejmi: On the idea of risk aversion, which as we know can crop up: a pitfall people can fall into is around confidence - the confidence to take a decision, the risk around getting it wrong, or somebody turning around and pointing the finger at some point. That can really significantly slow down decision velocity. A really useful tool I've employed with numerous clients over the years is this idea of fear setting. Fear setting is about looking at the worst-case scenario. Often we over-index on inaction because of fear of something happening - typically it's subconscious, or it might be driven by previous narratives that aren't relevant in this context, but they nonetheless slow us down or make us more averse to making a decision. When that's true, a really useful tool for unravelling it is exploring what the reality of the likelihood, or the impact, of the worst-case scenario showing itself actually is.
A really simple version of fear setting is taking yourself mentally through that process, to bring it to life, and then making a decision around it. For any decision: if I get it wrong, what's the worst-case scenario? What do I imagine, in the absolute worst of worst situations, could happen? And what's the likelihood of that happening? Put a percentage on it, score it from one to ten, whatever it might be. Once you've analysed that, you'll probably acknowledge that it's really unlikely, and that you should probably act accordingly. But if you want to go further into making it more tangible: if the worst case were to happen, what irredeemable or irreversible impact would it have? If any - chances are none, but explore it. And what would you do to get yourself back on track if that were to happen? Taking yourself through that process helps to bring the idea to life, and to acknowledge that the things we're worried about happening are infinitesimally small. But nonetheless, it's useful to explore it, bring it into focus, and then make a decision around it. Once you're aware of the thing you're fearful of, what do you want to do with that information? That helps to unblock a lot of action - I've found it really useful at times.
Should reversible and irreversible decisions be treated differently?
Glenn: Really cool. Last thing from me, just to finish this off, because you prompted me to this word: reversible versus irreversible. Even just as a first step, look at the decision and categorise it. Is it reversible? In which case it's relatively low-stakes, and you can make those decisions much more quickly. If it's irreversible, then you probably want to take more time and go into greater depth with the research and the commitment side of things. I think that's a really useful categorisation tool. And if you layer over the top of that how political the decision is - and that can apply to reversible or irreversible - that adds another layer of dynamic in there. But it's another useful tip for people to take away: when you're first asked to make a decision that feels quite big, you can do all the things we've talked about, but also just start by thinking - is this going to be irreversible if I make it? How is that going to impact how I engage with the decision itself?
Nejmi: I love that. Okay - some really practical tools, then, to help think about what you can do to judge the right speed around decisions; what clarity you need to be able to make the decision, or clarity on what the right decision even is; and beyond that, what you can do to be committed to, or to drive commitment to, that decision. Getting all of those things right means moving at the right velocity for your context - and you've got some brilliant tools there to help in that endeavour.
Glenn: Cool, great stuff. I really enjoyed that, and I hope people find it helpful. I think the most important thing to take away is: if you're a leader or a manager in an organisation, this is part of your job. Getting better at it - not just the technical bits of what the decision-making process is, but the way to make decisions at the right speed - is a key part of your role. And if you do it well more often than not, that's good for you, and it'll be good for your business. So hopefully we'll have helped people - made a positive impact in that way. Awesome. All right, see you on the next one. Take care.
Nejmi: Brilliant - that's what we aim for. Thanks very much. Cheers, bye.
Transcript lightly edited for clarity: filler, false starts and crosstalk removed; punctuation corrected. Content otherwise faithful to the recording.
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