The decisions that are slowing your team down.

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Hey Spark Family,

I was working with a senior leader recently who was genuinely frustrated by the pace of her organization.

Not the people. She had strong people. Not the strategy. That was clear and compelling. Not the resources. The budget was there.

It was something harder to name.

Everything seemed to move through too many rooms before anything actually got decided. Good ideas were losing momentum somewhere between the people who had them and the people who could actually move them forward.

She said what so many leaders quietly feel:

“It just takes so long to get anything done around here.”

So I asked her to walk me through the last three decisions that had taken longer than they should have.

The pattern showed up quickly.

The decisions themselves were not the problem. The process around them was.

Approvals that no longer served a clear purpose. Reviews that had been added over time and never removed. Handoffs between teams where nobody was quite sure who owned the final call.

The strategy was strong.

The system around the decisions was slowing everything down.

The Research Is Clear

McKinsey’s State of Organizations 2026 report, based on input from more than 10,000 organizational leaders across 16 countries, named what so many leaders are feeling inside their companies right now:

➡ Two-thirds of leaders say their organizations are overly complex and inefficient.

Not a few. Two-thirds.

➡ 72% of leaders say their organizations are not fully prepared for what’s ahead.

And the traditional fixes, restructuring, delayering, flattening hierarchies, are hitting diminishing returns.

Because most complexity is not sitting on the org chart.

It is sitting inside the way work moves. The approvals. The handoffs. The unclear ownership. The meetings that feel useful but do not actually move decisions forward.

➡ Most organizations don’t have a strategy problem. They have a friction problem.

And the leaders who solve it are the ones willing to look honestly at how decisions actually happen, not just how they are supposed to happen.

What I'm Seeing In The Field

What we see over and over is that this kind of friction almost never starts as a bad decision.

It usually starts as a reasonable one.

A review step gets added after something goes sideways. An approval stays in place because it helped when the team was smaller. A leader keeps herself in the decision chain because she cares deeply about quality. A team avoids naming who really owns the call because nobody wants to create unnecessary tension.

All of that makes sense.

Until it doesn’t.

Because over time, those reasonable little layers start to add weight. Meetings still happen, but they do not actually move decisions forward. Smart people start holding back ideas because they already know how long the process will take. Teams learn to manage around the system instead of moving through it.

And slowly, without anyone meaning for it to happen, the whole organization starts to feel heavier than it needs to feel.

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What We Teach Leaders Inside Spark Brilliance

When I work with leaders on this, I come back to one simple exercise:

Take the last five decisions on your team that took longer than they should have. Walk each one backward.

Where exactly did it slow down?

In almost every case, the friction lives in one of three places.

Unclear ownership. When everyone has input but nobody owns the call, the decision moves at the speed of the slowest relationship. Clarity means naming the person who actually owns the decision, not just the people who should weigh in.

Unnecessary approval layers. Ask honestly: if this approval disappeared tomorrow, what would actually break? Sometimes the answer is important. Often, the honest answer is nothing.

Decisions being made at the wrong level. If people keep escalating things they should own, that is usually not a capability problem. It is a clarity problem. People cannot move faster when they do not know what they are trusted to own.

🌟 Your Challenge This Week

Before your week gets moving, trace one real decision that took longer than it should have.

Ask yourself:

• Where did it actually slow down?
• Who owned the final call?
• Which approval, review, meeting, or handoff added value?
• Which one simply added time?

And the one worth sitting with longest:

Are you still in the decision chain for things your team should be owning without you?

Speed is not the goal.

Clarity is.

When leaders remove unnecessary friction, they do more than speed up decisions.

They give smart people their momentum back.

With gratitude,
​Jackie

P.S. – P.S. Friction was built. It can be dismantled.✨

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