Getting the right system in place

In 2026, companies are being judged not just on what they decide, but how fast, how consistently and with what quality of thinking/rigour. AI has raised the bar. Capital is tighter. Scrutiny is higher. And the cost of slow, fragmented, or poorly‑reasoned decisions compounds quietly until it shows up as wasted spend, missed opportunities or governance failures.

This guide is about building a decision‑making system, not a PDF policy document, not a spreadsheet, not a committee but a living system that reflects how modern companies need to operate in 2026. 

Organisations don’t all start from the same place, so to get the most out of the guide align your starting point with your organisation's level of decision system maturity.  Don’t worry if you are coming from a basic starting point, the good news is that it isn’t hard to execute and be in a far better position by the end of Q1 than you’re probably in today. So pick a champion and get it done. 

Why companies need a decision‑making system in 2026

The obvious reasons (always true, always important)

• Governance & accountability: Boards, auditors, and regulators expect clarity on who approved what, why, and based on which information.

• Risk management: Unclear approval paths create accidental bets - spend, commitments, or strategic moves no one explicitly owned.

• Consistency: Two identical decisions shouldn’t get wildly different treatment depending on who happens to be in the room.

The reflecting‑the‑times reasons (now unavoidable)

• Speed is a competitive advantage: If it takes weeks to approve a decision that should take days, your competitors will out‑execute you and you won’t keep up with opportunities to save costs or improve outcomes. 

• AI depends on clean decision data: AI tools can only help allocate resources, forecast outcomes, or optimise spend if they can see how decisions are made.

• Distributed teams: Decisions no longer happen in one room, on one day, with one leader.

A modern decision‑making system does three things well:

1. Clarifies authority

2. Improves the quality of thinking

3. Captures decision intelligence for the future

Choose your starting point

“We don’t have a clear matrix on what kind of decisions need to be approved by who”

If this is you, start here.

Introduction: clarity beats control

The goal isn’t to add bureaucracy. It’s to remove ambiguity.

When people don’t know:

• whether something is capex or opex,

• whether it’s budgeted or unbudgeted,

• or who actually needs to approve it,

…they either over‑escalate (wasting time) or under‑escalate (creating risk).

Step one: get spend categorisation right

Get spend types and limits clear. Confirm what kind of justification is required based on this.

It allows team member to own the business case, while management evaluates it.

At minimum, define approval limits and process steps across:

• Capex vs Opex

• Budgeted vs Unbudgeted

Example approval matrix - check out a more detailed example here. 

This table is not the system. It’s an input.

Balance rigour with practicality

A fit‑for‑purpose matrix:

• Is simple enough that people actually use it

• Is strict enough to prevent leakage

• Evolves as the business grows

Over‑engineering this stage creates avoidance. Under‑engineering creates chaos.

Digitise it early

If your approval logic lives in a PDF, it’s already failing.

Use a platform like Riff to:

• Encode the matrix once

• Let people work naturally on ideas

• Have the system determine who needs to approve what in line with your matrix

No flicking. No guessing. No stale documents.

“We have a matrix, but approvals happen in more than one place”

Email. Teams. Meetings. Slack. Hallway conversations.

This is the most common and most expensive failure mode.

Why this breaks down

Sending people to a PDF that says who needs to approve what assumes:

• They’ll read it

• They’ll interpret it correctly

• They’ll follow it under time pressure

They won’t. 

The result:

• Friction and confusion

• Decisions approved without full context

• Spend leakage

• No record of the reasoning

The wasted time is bad. The low quality bets getting made without the right oversight are worse.

Replace routing with intelligence

Instead of teaching people process, build the process into the work.

With a platform like Riff:

• People work on an idea or spend justification in one place

• The system already knows the approval rules

• The right approvers are automatically involved

No manual routing. No parallel conversations. No ambiguity.

At the end of the year, you know every key decision is captured in this system.

Now improve the quality of thinking

This is where great companies separate themselves.

Strong companies don’t just make decisions faster, they make better decisions that others can quickly understand.

Riff provides the support every employee needs to turn their thoughts, ideas or requests into clear, fast justifications that make life easy for approvers.

What makes a high‑quality decision?

A high‑quality decision:

• Has a clear problem statement

• Articulates the options considered (including doing nothing)

• Makes assumptions explicit

• Quantifies impact where possible (financial and non-financial - think sustainability for example)

• Acknowledges risks and trade‑offs

• States what would change the decision

• Is legible to someone outside the immediate team

Speed without quality just accelerates mistakes.

Scale support to develop good judgement

It’s a skill teams can learn. People need to move from “I want” to “This is why we should”.  

Riff acts like a mentor at scale.

The agent:

• Knows what good looks like

• Anticipates the questions a CFO or CEO will ask

• Prompts employees to strengthen their thinking

• Gives people space to do this before escalation

Employees don’t outsource thinking to AI, they sharpen their own thinking with it.

If you want certain things covered off by business decision type, you can customize the agents to support this. 

Evaluating: “Should we do this?”

This question sounds simple. It rarely is.

Cross‑functional evaluation is painful because:

• Context is fragmented

• Feedback is lost

• Rationales disappear once a decision is made

Step 1: bring the discussion together

Get all stakeholder input in one place. Riff automates this for you. Not:

• A tick‑box in Excel

• A yes/no workflow

• A meeting with no artefact

The discussion - questions, concerns, disagreements, is the real asset.

When captured:

• Teams learn faster

• AI learns patterns

• Future decisions improve

Step 2: encode decision rules

If your organisation has rules like:

• Minimum payback periods

• IRR thresholds

• Strategic filters

Stop hiding them in PDFs.

Give them to the agents in Riff so they can:

• Explain why the rules exist to employees

• Apply them consistently

• Run calculations proactively

• Help employees understand trade‑offs

This turns compliance into capability.

The benefits

A modern decision‑making system delivers compounding returns:

For employees

• Less time formatting, more time thinking

• Clear ownership of business cases

• Confidence in having clarity

• Less back and forth with managers after effort has been wasted

For approvers

• Fewer back‑and‑forth questions

• Higher quality business cases, less noise

• Decisions arrive already pressure‑tested

• Less cognitive load, everything is in one place

For the organisation

• Stronger governance

• Money and time saved

• Consistent capital allocation

• Clean decision data for AI

• Faster, better execution

In 2026, decision‑making isn’t a meeting. It’s a system.

See what you could implement with ease

Book a 30-minute session with our team. We'll:

• Understand your current approval flow and your desired state 

• Share best practice for decision systems in 2026, demonstrating where AI can help

• Show you what a Riff-powered system looks like in action for operations and leaders approving