Decision Speed Is a Competitive Advantage
A few weeks into a role at Amazon, I watched a customer complaint sit untouched for three days. Nobody was ignoring it — the one person who had authority to approve the fix was on annual leave, and there was no backup, no delegation, no plan B. The team could see the problem. They just couldn’t move on it.
That stuck with me longer than it probably should have. Not because it was dramatic — it wasn’t. It was just three quiet days where a customer waited and a team stood around a decision they weren’t allowed to make. And I started noticing the same pattern everywhere after that: approval chains that only work if one specific person is available, information that lives in someone’s head instead of somewhere everyone can find it, meetings where people talk about a decision without anyone actually making it.
None of that is really a communication problem in the way we usually think about it. It’s not that people are bad at talking to each other. It’s that the structure of how decisions get made has a single point of failure, and the business only moves as fast as that one point allows.
I run Your Virtual Organizer on my own now, which you’d think would solve the problem entirely — there’s only one decision-maker, and it’s me. But I’ve caught myself doing a smaller version of the same thing: holding a decision in my head because I know the answer, instead of writing it down so it doesn’t have to come back through me every single time. The bottleneck doesn’t disappear just because the business is small. It just gets quieter.
The fix isn’t complicated. It’s noticing where a decision keeps waiting on one person — including yourself — and building something small that doesn’t depend on that person being available. A written answer to the question that keeps getting asked. A default that covers the common case, so the exception is the only thing that needs a real decision.
Your turn: where in your business does everything still have to go through one person? What would it take to change that this week?