As organisations scale, the number of decisions multiplies. Design changes, commercial adjustments, budget approvals, safety reviews. What begins as a nimble, founder-led process can quickly become tangled as layers of management form and project complexity rises.
When ownership isn’t explicit, teams fall into the gap. They wait for approvals that never come, or chase the wrong people for sign-off. Each hour lost compounds across schedules and supply chains, quietly eroding delivery confidence.
Clients notice. A reputation builds quietly: “They take forever to come back.” For businesses competing in tight procurement environments, slow or inconsistent decision-making is more than an operational issue. It’s a governance risk that directly affects growth.
McKinsey’s 2025 research found that cross-functional management processes, such as strategic planning and performance reviews, consume 40 to 65 per cent of management and overhead time.
A lack of effort did not cause this. It’s unclear ownership and overlapping governance layers that trap decisions in review cycles.
In this article, we explore how decision-making clarity has become a hidden governance capability. And why formal structure, far from being bureaucracy, is often what enables speed, consistency, and trust.
Where decisions stall, risk spreads
In practice, the cost of unclear ownership isn’t found in major failures, but in the small, everyday delays that compound over time.
Unclear ownership turns simple approvals into bottlenecks.
A project team might spend days seeking a signature for a design variation because no one knows who has final authority. In one mid-tier construction firm, a routine variation took a week to approve because three different managers believed they were responsible.
By the time clarity emerged, the contractor had lost three working days and the client had begun asking questions.
These small moments add up. Each delay ripples through delivery schedules, stretching budgets and testing relationships.
What looks like inefficiency on the surface is often the symptom of a deeper governance gap: decisions made without clear accountability, documentation, or escalation.
The hidden risk of informal decisions
When structure slows down, people improvise. Approvals move from formal workflows to quick emails, handshakes, or side conversations. In the short term it might feel efficient. Less paperwork, faster action. But informal decision-making quietly removes the safeguards that governance provides.
Without a documented trail, thresholds are missed, dependencies ignored, and rationale lost. Over time, these shortcuts create exposure on three fronts:
- Commercial: costs change without visibility or agreement.
- Compliance: audits and disputes lack evidence of proper approval.
- Cultural: teams receive mixed signals about what “good governance” means.
These risks aren’t new. They’re the reason governance frameworks exist in the first place: to turn hard-earned lessons into structure.
Many structured forms and approval templates exist because they’re built from “burns and scars”—the lessons of past failures.
They capture what organisations have learned over time: projects where missing signatures or vague instructions caused costly rework. When those guardrails are bypassed, businesses re-create the very risks these systems were designed to prevent.
KPMG Australia’s 2024 report highlights that strong governance depends on independent oversight, clear decision authority, and transparent accountability structures, the qualities that protect trust and performance in complex environments.
These are the same disciplines that fast-growing businesses often lose sight of as decision-making becomes more informal.
Clarity as a governance capability
Clear decision-making builds confidence across every level of an organisation. When roles and authorities are explicit, people stop guessing. Escalation paths become predictable, communication sharpens, and projects move faster with certainty.
Strong governance is more than bureaucracy. It’s design. It defines who decides, what information is needed, and when to escalate. Done well, it balances agility with assurance, keeping small decisions close to the work while ensuring major changes receive the right scrutiny.
Safety management provides a useful analogy. In safety governance, no task proceeds without clarity on roles, permits, and escalation. The same discipline applied to commercial or operational decisions dramatically reduces delivery risk. Both protect value, where one safeguards people, the other performance.
The cultural cost of indecision
Apart from delaying projects, gaps in governance also shape behaviour.
When approvals take days, teams learn to wait rather than act. When criteria shift from one project to the next, planning loses meaning. And when decisions are made verbally with no record, accountability fades, leaving room for conflict when outcomes disappoint.
Over time, this inconsistency becomes cultural. People adapt to uncertainty. They hedge, double-check, or avoid ownership altogether. Projects then drift not because teams lack capability, but because the organisation has normalised ambiguity.
That’s why decision clarity must be treated as a leadership function, not an administrative task. Leaders set the tone for how decisions are made, communicated, and recorded. Governance follows their example.
Building visibility and resilience
Improving governance begins with a simple question: Where are decisions really being made?
Mapping how approvals move through an organisation often exposes surprising bottlenecks. Emails that sit unanswered, parallel sign-offs that contradict each other, or critical calls made without documentation.
Formalising these pathways doesn’t mean adding red tape. It means creating consistency, accountability, and traceability at speed. High-performing organisations:
- Define clear decision rights and thresholds.
- Establish escalation protocols linked to risk level.
- Embed communication loops that confirm outcomes.
This approach transforms governance from a reactive process into a resilience system, where information flows predictably, risk is visible early, and delivery teams operate with confidence rather than caution.
Closing
Unclear decision-making rarely appears on a risk register. It shows up in quiet delays, informal approvals, and rising frustration. Yet its cost is real, measured in time, money, and reputation.
Most governance failures don’t start with bad intent. They start with good people making quick decisions in systems that weren’t designed for speed or scale.
Good governance makes those systems work. It gives leaders and teams the confidence to act quickly and responsibly. Because decisiveness, at its best, isn’t about speed. It’s about clarity.
At Shivendra & Co, we help organisations strengthen governance through clarity — defining decision rights, establishing escalation protocols, and embedding accountability frameworks that enable delivery at scale.
When governance becomes clear, confidence follows.
References
McKinsey & Company. (2025). Want to break the productivity ceiling? Rethink the way work gets done. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/want-to-break-the-productivity-ceiling-rethink-the-way-work-gets-done
KPMG Australia. (2024). Our commitment to governance, accountability and culture: A continuous improvement journey. https://kpmg.com/au/en/home/about/governance.html