Most performance gaps are not execution problems. They are decision problems.
I have been in enough steering meetings to recognise the moment. The strategy sounds solid. People are constructive. Risks are acknowledged. The room leaves with a sense of alignment.
Two weeks later, delivery slows down, and nobody can quite name why.
It is not because people stopped working. It is because the decision stayed open inside the system. Each function starts interpreting, and each interpretation is rational from their seat. Product protects speed. Risk protects control. Finance protects cost. Operations protects feasibility. The trade-offs between those priorities were never made explicit, so the project becomes a polite renegotiation disguised as execution.
When leaders see this, they tend to reach the same conclusion: the strategy was sound, execution fell short. After that, the remedies are predictable. Tighter governance. More reporting. Clearer milestones or more demos. A renewed push for alignment.
That response feels logical. It is also, in many cases, treating a symptom.
A decision is only real when you can say what it costs
I have learned to listen for the sentences that sound efficient and create chaos later.
“We can do both.”
“Let’s not overcomplicate it.”
“We’ll figure it out as we go.”
“Everyone knows what we mean.”
Sometimes those statements are true. Often they are the moment a decision quietly becomes implicit. The cost shows up later, when the organisation tries to execute and discovers it never closed the options it is now struggling with.
That is why Michael Porter’s line still matters. “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do” (Porter, Harvard Business Review, November to December 1996). The same applies to other decisions as execution can only be successful if choices are clear (Lewis, Harvard Business Review, October 2017).
Hidden trade-offs do not disappear. They convert.
In the room, ambiguity looks like flexibility. It feels like keeping options open. It can even feel like leadership.
If the trade-offs are not visible, people are not weighing them; they are ignoring them . The cost still exists. It just shows up later. It converts into friction,into politics into rework.
Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein give another name to what leaders feel when this happens. They call it “noise”, unwanted variability in judgments that should be identical. When decisions are unclear, people fill the gap with their own interpretation, each believing they are aligned. (Kahneman, Sibony and Sunstein, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, 2021).
So when leaders say, “we have an alignment problem,” I often hear something different: we have a trade off that was never made explicit. The alignment issue is the symptom. The implicit decision is the cause.
Not every gap responds to the same kind of clarity
For some decisions, the variables are known. The trade-offs are measurable. Complicated, but the choice is between defined options with calculable consequences.
Others are different. The probabilities are unstable. The variables interact. Cause and effect only become visible in retrospect. In complex environments, it’s not about resolving that ambiguity. (Snowden & Boone (2007), Cynefin (HBR)A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making)
You may not know the outcome, but you can still make the assumptions explicit, define the boundaries, and state what would change your mind.
The practical takeaway is direct: when a leader tightens governance on a complex problem, they are applying a complicated domain solution. It will not work. The resulting gap will look, again, like an execution failure.
The danger is not ambiguity. It is unowned ambiguity.
What explicit decision-making actually changes
Explicit decision-making is often framed as a process. I see it as respect.
Respect for people’s effort, because it stops the organization from burning time on work that will later be reinterpreted. Respect for speed, because it moves the friction to the front, where it’s productive. Respect for ownership, because people can only truly own what they understand.
The key is not more meetings, more control or more stand-ups. It’s a higher standard for what counts as a decision.
A practical standard leaders can use immediately
If you want this to work in the real world, keep it brutally simple. For the next five decisions, insist that the decision owner publishes three sentences within 24 hours.
We decided to do X.
We will not do Y (and that’s the trade-off).
As a result, we accept consequence Z (cost, capacity, risk, timing).
If any of those sentences can’t be written, the decision isn’t ready. It may be discussed. It may be desired. But it isn’t closed.
Annette van Berge Henegouwen