Most owner-CEOs will say they react quickly. It rarely turns out that way when you measure it. Here's the short exercise — it takes ten minutes and usually gives a more honest picture than gut feel.
The exercise
- Pick the most recent difficult decision you made. A layoff, a price increase, the loss of a customer, a strategy change.
- Find the date of the first concrete signal pointing toward the decision. Not the first hunch — the first concrete sign you can put a date on.
- Find the date the decision was made. Not "thought about". Made — communicated to the organisation.
- Count the months between the two.
Where you sit
Under 3 months is fast. 3 to 6 months is typical for an SME. 6 to 12 months is delayed — there's almost certainly a concrete cost to having waited that you can quantify. Over 12 months usually means the decision should have been taken much earlier. The next difficult decision rarely comes alone, and the options are usually narrower by the time it lands.
The number that matters most
The important thing isn't the individual number. It's whether you've got faster or slower over the last two years. Compare the most recent difficult decision with the one before.
If you've become faster, it's probably going the right way. If you've become slower, it's often a sign that something else in the business is starting to slow decisions down — more stakeholders, fewer options, more complexity. That's often where decision latency starts becoming structural.