Published
Methodology
Longitudinal quantitative study tracking 1,180 decisions across 68 organisations over 30 months
Co-Authors
Dr. Samuel Adeyemi
Dr. Lena Hoffmann
Claire Whitfield
Paper Length
28 pages
Cite as
Ellery, J., Adeyemi, S., Hoffmann, L., & Whitfield, C. (2026). Decision latency in large organisations. Administrative Science Quarterly Review, 22(1), 44–71.
Copy citation
Most efforts to speed up decisions target the moment of choice, which is rarely where the time goes. This study measures latency across the full decision path and shows that the majority of delay accumulates before a decision is formally tabled.
Where the time actually goes
Tracking 1,180 decisions across 68 organisations over thirty months, deliberation accounted for a median of nine per cent of elapsed time. The remainder was spent waiting: for a scheduled forum, for a missing approval, for a document nobody had been asked to write.
“
Most organisations are not slow at deciding. They are slow at arriving at the point where a decision is permitted.
Queues, not debates
Latency clustered at handovers between committees. Each additional forum in a decision path added a median of nineteen days, irrespective of the complexity of the question being asked.
What shortened the path
Organisations in the fastest quartile shared one trait: a written threshold describing which decisions did not require a forum at all. Speed came from removing steps, not from compressing them.
