Many organisations say decisions feel harder than they used to. Is that because people are less capable, or because the decisions themselves have changed? More often than not, it is the latter.

A typical decision today might involve:

·      cost targets that are fixed in annual budgets,
·      performance or quality expectations that cannot be compromised,
·      delivery reliability in increasingly volatile supply chains, and
·      longer-term implications that are harder to quantify or compare.

So what actually needs to shift? Not the ambition to “get it right,” but the way options are compared. Instead of asking, “Which option feels best?”, a more useful question is, “Have we looked at all the factors together and do we know what’s important?”