If you’re still signing off decisions from random Teams messages and scrappy emails, you don’t have a decision process, you have a liability.

This series is about fixing that.

We’ll look at how decisions really happen inside companies, why so many go wrong and how AI can pull your organisation out of gut-feel chaos, while also laying the foundation for “decision intelligence” across the organisation that boosts productivity, accountability and governance.  

Why Most Companies Don’t Actually Have a Decision System

If you ask most leadership teams whether they have a decision-making system, they’ll usually say yes. They’ll mention their planning process or their review meetings or the fact that they “talk things through as a team.” For most organisations their decision systems are informal, scattered or ignored. It’s only a few moves that go through a process that allows people to know why a call was made. 

Often the company will have a  collection of tools that look like structure. There are PDF forms that require signatures, eSignature platforms that timestamp approvals, Excel files passed around as budgets, and long chains of Teams messages where people try to clarify what was agreed. All of this activity feels like a process, but in reality it’s just documentation wrapped around a series of gut-feel decisions. None of it creates the clarity, consistency or shared logic that an actual decision system requires.

Midmarket companies or scaling start ups grow at a pace where decisions become heavier over time, but not so fast that anyone pauses to redesign how those decisions should actually occur. The chaos just became the norm and people accept that this is the way things are despite the problems being obvious from the outside.

Here’s what typically happens.

Decisions Default to Whoever Cares the Most

In the absence of structure, a strong voice, a confident personality, or a long history with the company can end up carrying more weight than data or logic. This isn’t because people lack discipline. It’s because no one has clarity on who actually decides, what information is required, or the criteria that the decision is evaluated against. Without that clarity, teams fall back on emotional logic, and the person who pushes hardest often wins.

Approvals Become Ad Hoc and Reactive

Many companies behave as though they have a governance process because people “run things by Finance” or escalate major decisions to the CEO. But this isn’t governance. It’s a traffic jam of uncoordinated requests and last-minute reviews. A CFO suddenly receives an unexpected approval request. An executive jumps in late and asks for a full re-evaluation. A routine operational decision turns into a senior-level debate because no one was clear on whether it required that level oversight in the first place (internally we refer to this as sticking your beak in it). These moments aren’t signs of a robust process, they are indications that people don’t really understand what is expected of them. 

Logic Varies Widely Across Teams

One team bases decisions on payback periods. Another focuses on margin. Another optimises for speed. And another emphasises customer experience as the number one thing. Each method is reasonable on its own, but together they create fragmentation. When the logic behind decisions shifts from department to department, the organisation loses coherence. Leaders end up debating frameworks rather than outcomes, and the CFO becomes the person trying to piece together these different perspectives into something resembling alignment.

Even where there is alignment on the evaluation criteria, there is often variability on how teams actually communicate the merits of a project. All too often we hear about the million dollar capital replacement project written up as a one pager while at the same company a decision to purchase a $500/mth software subscription has a 20 page write up that nobody will ever read. Decision making can be costly, and making the wrong decision can be even more expensive so finding the balance is important.

Decisions Don’t Stick and Get Revisited Repeatedly

When the system is unclear, decisions often lack durability. Teams “circle back” and re-examine choices because conditions have changed, or they didn’t trust the original call, or they weren’t part of the conversation, or they were never told what criteria guided the decision in the first place. The company slips into a cycle of re-litigation, and energy that could have been channeled to execution and making the project a success ends up getting diverted to internal point scoring and “I told you so”s.

Escalation Becomes the Default

When people don’t know how to navigate a decision, they escalate it upward. This isn’t done with bad intent. It simply feels safer. Escalation becomes the path of least resistance. Someone suggests checking with the CFO. Someone else proposes taking it to the executive team. Someone wants the CEO’s perspective “just to be sure.” Soon senior management are bogged down with choices that should have been resolved several layers below. It may look like diligence, but it’s really a sign that people don’t trust the process or are worried about the consequences of being wrong on a decision.

Why This Matters for CFOs

CFOs feel the absence of a decision system more than anyone else. They sit at the intersection of every function, so they become the default place where unresolved choices end up. Instead of being a strategic partner, finance becomes the bottleneck. The cost is significant. Execution slows. Emotions rise. Strategies lose cohesion. Teams revisit the same problems from scratch. Leaders spend more time negotiating process than making progress.

The solution is not more meetings, more documentation, or more layers of approval. What companies need is a shared, explicit system for how decisions are made that belongs in this century. A place that is collaborative, where understanding context and the degree to which these choices have been stress tested is clear. Teams will move faster because they know what’s expected. People are more accountable when it comes to the rigour they have applied  to their thinking - in the era of AI, ‘it takes too long to work through’ is no longer an excuse. Escalations drop because there is a clear demonstration of work and process. 

For most businesses the first step towards building out a robust decision system is realising that all of the random steps and hoops that your team are jumping through currently to get initiatives approved actually isn’t a decision system. From there, the CFO can finally architect something better. A real decision system doesn’t add weight. It removes noise, builds confidence, and frees people to focus on doing the work rather than negotiating how the work gets approved.