Program Rescue · Field Notes
Slow isn't careful. Why decision paralysis sinks more programs than bad decisions do.
A program I was brought in on had the right person named to make a scope-cut call. The recommendation had been sitting on her desk for six weeks. Every status report listed it the same way: "pending further analysis." Nobody could tell me when that analysis would actually finish, or what new information it was waiting on. She wasn't blocked by anyone. She was blocked by wanting a level of certainty that wasn't coming.
That's a different failure than the one I usually write about here. It's not that no one owns the decision. It's that the owner won't make the call. And stalling reads as diligence right up until it reads as the reason the program missed its window.
The data backs up the pattern
This isn't just a feeling from being in the room. The cost of slow, low-confidence decision-making is well documented:
Most decision-making time is wasted. McKinsey found that managers at a typical Fortune 500 company spend 37% of their time making decisions, and rate 58% of that time as spent ineffectively. Only 20% of respondents say their organization is good at making decisions in the first place.
Speed and quality move together, not against each other. The same McKinsey research found that faster decision-makers also tend to produce higher-quality decisions. Slow isn't a sign of care. It's usually a sign that no one is willing to decide with the information already in the room.
Poor performance wastes roughly $2 trillion a year globally. PMI's 2025 Pulse of the Profession puts the average waste at 11.4 cents of every project dollar spent, and stalled decisions are a direct contributor: every week a call sits open is a week the rest of the program plans around a guess.
None of this is about hiring better decision-makers. It's about naming, out loud, what information a pending decision is actually waiting on, and what happens if it never arrives.
What waiting is actually costing you
A stalled decision doesn't show up as a red flag on a status report. It shows up as "pending," which looks calm right next to everything that's actually on fire. That's what makes it dangerous. The team downstream doesn't wait for clarity. They quietly plan around the most likely outcome, and by the time the decision finally lands, half the program has already built around a guess that may not match it.
What to actually check
If you sponsor or manage a program, here's what I check in week one, and what you can check yourself before it costs you a quarter:
- Has this exact decision appeared on three or more status reports without changing? If the language is identical week over week, it isn't under analysis anymore. It's stuck.
- Is the team waiting on "more information" with no defined arrival date? If no one can say when the missing input shows up, it's not a data problem. It's a decision the owner doesn't want to make yet.
- When was the last decision made with information that was less than perfect? If every decision on the program waits for full certainty, the program is optimizing for cover, not speed.
- Is there a date by which this gets decided with what we have? A decision with no deadline isn't being made carefully. It's being deferred indefinitely.
- Does postponing this decision have a visible cost, or does it feel free? If nobody can name what waiting is costing, that cost is being paid anyway. It's just not being tracked.
If a decision has been "pending" for more than two reporting cycles, don't ask for more analysis. Ask for a date.
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Tell me where a decision is stuck on your program.
A short conversation is enough to know if this is a fit. I work with organizations across supply chain, robotics, SaaS, and public-sector systems on program rescue and fractional delivery leadership.
Prefer email? oded@libi-tech.co