Still Deciding Like You Used To

You’re in a new phase of life that’s asking for a higher level of responsibility and intellect from you. And you want it. You want this higher level of success. You are not going to settle for anything less than significant improvement and quite frankly you already understand that throwing more resources towards the existing strategy is translating into failure. It’s time for you to take on a greater degree of authority.

The trouble is, the way you’re making decisions hasn’t altered. You’re unable to let go of the old decision-making authority that got you here. It still exists and is being used. Primarily because you were duly rewarded for that work. It was appropriate for that stage in your organisation. And the past few years reveal that this has become the tried and trusted way for the organisation to operate. And despite you sensing a new direction, you don’t trust it to be the right path. At this juncture, change often feels like a huge risk and a betrayal of the self you’ve constructed. And so, you still decide from the same internal position, using the same logic, the same instincts, and same limitations.

In this position, tension and frustration build for all those involved with the current system. You can see an alternative, but you don’t know how to use it. Simply because either you haven’t been shown how it works, or there’s no proof it will pay off. Changing lane feels unfamiliar, solitary, self-abandoning, rigid, perhaps even selfish. Quite clearly you understand that movement along this route is completely void of the guarantees and relational security you’re accustomed to having around your decisions. So you tell yourself it’s better to stick with what you know, the status quo, even as it stops producing the results you want. Or even as the stress increases and the cost increases. You convince yourself if you try harder, something will move. And despite it requiring extra effort, it feels easy to sit in the seat. What’s not realised is that you choose to operate from hope rather than accountability.

Of course, the people around you reinforce this without realising it. They advise you from the version of you they recognise. They support you in what feels sensible, reasonable, and familiar. Unfortunately the trade off is that they hold you to an old performance.

What also often goes unexamined here is how much adaptation is occurring beneath the surface, both within yourself and the system around you. People adjust themselves to the way decisions are made. They learn how to speak, when to wait, what to avoid and, in some organisations, this creates a rhythm that feels safe. In others, chaos persists. But even there, within that chaos, people adapt to uncertainty, inconsistency, and decisions that arrive late or not at all. Over time, that adaptation becomes normalised, even though it’s costly.

Questioning the existing decision reasoning presents as risk. At this stage in the organisation, risk threatens the predictability of the system, relationships, and informal power. Without realising it, with the best of intentions and quite instinctively, the system protects itself. Alignment with the current decision-making authority is interpreted as safety. Trust lies within what is familiar. And anyone who challenges or attempts to move beyond the existing logic risks being isolated, misread, or even resisted. Where outdated decision-making authority persists long after it has stopped working, organisational breakdown becomes evident. It occurs because the logic used has shown itself to be effective in the past and is therefore familiar and established. In the present circumstances, the cost of disruption, alteration or annihilation of the system feels higher than the cost of endurance.

At this stage in the game, few really point out the emotional cost. Everyone within the system is experiencing it. Consequently, there is a huge cost of delay, inefficiency, and broken systems, and increased levels of friction. Decisions begin to take too long because the instinct is to move cautiously, or to be guided by reassurance rather than consequence. This introduces more cost. The organisation is now in a period where increased labour rarely, if ever, is the solution. We observe within the C-suite the cost compounding steadily. Much more broadly, across the organisation, momentum slows and people start checking out. Too much energy is spent maintaining coherence with an obsolete way of operating rather than creating movement. Under the belief that what’s broken will be repaired by more pressure, what is actually experienced is continued regression. And oftentimes, this is where the real loss sits.

What makes this stage particularly difficult to address is how quickly people adapt, even when the environment is dysfunctional. Tension is absorbed rather than questioned. Delays are worked around. Inefficiencies are accommodated. People compensate for what isn’t working. Over time, capability is spent managing the system or firefighting rather than moving it forward. This adaptation may look like resilience, but it is continuous erosion.

In real time, this is not recognised as loss because the system can’t announce its moment of breakdown. What shows up instead is depletion and extra labour that only converts to stagnation. By the time the cost becomes visible, it has already been absorbed into the baseline of the culture. This organisation has learned to live with underperformance and to break away feels like collapse. So we keep applying bandages to open wounds.

Let’s not forget the financial loss in all of this. When decision-making authority hasn’t caught up with responsibility, value leaks. Growth fails to occur and there seems to be no single failure point that explains it. And this is happening in more organisations than we care to admit. Resources are consumed managing hesitation rather than backing direction. Over time, the gap between what is possible and what is realised widens. The organisation, the work, the role, all carry more weight than they need to. The irony is that the very decision patterns that once protected success now quietly cap it.

Once the organisation has arrived here, working harder doesn’t resolve the problem. It intensifies it. Applying extra resources to an outdated authorising position creates internal friction and external drag. Sometimes temporary relief is achieved, but until true autonomy is realised, you find yourself compensating rather than leading, absorbing pressure rather than directing it. Decisions feel more stressful than they should, because they are being made from a version of you that no longer fits the level of consequence involved. It’s a mismatch between identity and authority.

Eventually, there is a decision that must be made about authorship. Decide whether you are willing to stop letting an old version of competence author the future. Until that decision is made, the tension remains, the cost continues, and progress, while still technically possible, will always feel more expensive than it needs to be.