Is The Market Changing Faster Than Your Organization Is Learning?
How to Accelerate Your Decision Velocity Before Growth Stalls
Summary
Do you feel as if your strategic decisions can’t keep pace with the market?
Across industries, decisions that once took weeks are now stretching into months.
The impact goes well beyond speed. Slow decisions lead to lost differentiation, stalled growth, and capital sitting idle while customer needs shift faster than the organization can respond. Your ability to build confidence through rapid evidence, and reduce the complexity that slows decisions down, will separate your organization from those who fall behind.
When the Market Moves Faster Than the Organization
We are living in a time of rapidly shifting customer expectations, a tightening of capital, and AI reshaping entire categories. Leaders are realizing decisions can no longer match the speed of the environment around them. Yet there is a powerful formula behind decisions that is easy to overlook:
Decision Velocity = Clarity × Confidence ÷ Complexity
Clarity = shared foresight, aligned goals, clear options
Confidence = evidence from assumption testing, early customer signals, external market validation
Complexity = organizational layers, governance drag, unclear ownership
Understanding decision velocity is the first step to making faster, more confident decisions. It slows when you spend too long debating assumptions that should have been tested sooner.
DuPont’s former Chief Technology & Sustainability Officer, Alexa Dembek, measured decision velocity by asking her leadership team one simple question:
“Are we learning faster than the market is changing?”
The Cost of Slow Decisions
Every leader I speak with, from software to hardware, categorized the cost of slow decisions into four major themes:
1. Misallocation of capital
Slow decisions push companies toward the safest, most visible bets. This blurs strategic alignment, with teams pursuing different time horizons and not even realizing it.
As Isuzu’s former Chief of Corporate Services and Risk, Ashwin Iyer, put it:
“Boards tend to think in terms of long runways, and require constant education in specialized areas, but we don’t have the luxury of spending multiple years in discussions anymore.”
Slow decisions mean capital is misallocated or sits idle, starving new growth initiatives.
2. Lost differentiation
In mature industries, differentiation erodes not because teams lack strong ideas, but because decision makers are too slow to act upon them.
“Polite agreement without commitment”, says Robert Lovegrove of Milliken, “makes execution harder, while competitors with fewer internal obstacles move faster.”
Slow decision cycles decrease the advantage in now mature markets. The result is an erosion in differentiation, not driven by external disruption, but by internal hesitation.
3. Hidden opportunity cost
In software, the cost of slow decisions shows up quickly. The delays permeate through roadmaps, customer commitments, and delivery cycles. Leaders point out that the impact can now be measured directly.
Sequoia’s Chief Innovation Officer, Vivek Rajanna, describes it as something they can now measure internally.
“We can see the opportunity cost. We can now quantify what was missed because the decision was delayed.”
When real time analytics expose the financial and executional cost of waiting, slow decisions are a visible liability.
4. Organizational drag
Slow decisions often reflect organizational drag, the accumulated friction that builds up through too many initiatives, too many stakeholders, and too many handoffs. As portfolios expand, the organization becomes harder to navigate and decisions become harder to move forward.
Bosch’s venture-building unit saw a similar pattern as initiatives grew in number and teams became larger.
As Axel Deniz, CEO of Bosch Business Innovations puts it:
“The smaller the organization got, the faster we moved.”
Leaders across industries describe the same issue, complexity slows decisions more reliably than risk does.
So What Helps Increase Decision Velocity?
Across industries, leaders aren’t adding more tools, dashboards, or layers of analysis.
They’re speeding up by removing the friction that makes decisions slow in the first place.
Different organizations reach that point in different ways.
At Milliken, flattening decision layers cut capital approvals from months to weeks.
DuPont builds momentum through early evidence with small desirability signals that give leaders the confidence to commit sooner.
Isuzu uses quarterly decision loops that keep governance moving.
Sequoia unified its data so teams spend less time debating spreadsheets and more time testing scenarios.
Bosch speeds up simply by doing less, fewer initiatives, fewer handoffs, fewer competing priorities.
These aren’t isolated tactics. They reflect a deeper shift in which organizations move faster when they reduce the drag they’ve created for themselves.
Underneath all of it is a simple insight, the speed of a decision isn’t about how quickly someone says “yes.” It’s about how quickly the organization builds enough confidence to say yes.
And that confidence comes from evidence.
When organizations learn early, align clearly, and reduce the complexity that slows decisions down, velocity becomes a byproduct.
The companies that excel will be the ones that remove friction between a question and the evidence needed to answer it.
Prepare One Decision
What decision are you preparing right now?
If your team is stuck on a high uncertainty bet, the problem is usually not speed, it’s unclear evidence.
Precoil helps leadership teams prepare one decision for a clear Commit, Correct, or Cut outcome before more time or money is spent.
