At a Glance
- A circling decision is rarely short of facts or opinions. It is usually short of someone who acts.
- A decision is not an action. A yes from three groups does not start anything.
- The cost is not in asking. It is in asking the wrong people, or not asking the right ones.
- Count who has been consulted, then name the one person responsible for acting.
- Ask the questions below before you ask for another round.
When the same item keeps showing up on your agenda, stop and ask why. What is actually stopping you from doing something about it? Either it is a no, we are not doing this, or it is a yes, we are. Anything in between has a cost, and you are paying it every week.
Why does a decision keep circling when the team has all the facts?
In my experience, usually one of four things: nobody has been told the call is theirs, the room does not share the same information, a no was quietly overruled by silence, or there is a real disagreement nobody has said out loud.
If you have a capable team, plenty of opinions and a decision that keeps circling, the Stuck on Consensus page walks through those four. Which one is true here?
Then ask the harder question. What does it cost to keep waiting? Every time you defer, something else does not move. Are you aware of what is moving and what is not?
You are probably not alone. In McKinsey’s 2019 decision-making survey, only 20% of respondents said their organizations excel at decision making, and a majority said much of the time they spend on decisions is used ineffectively.
When is a decision not enough?
When nobody acts on it. A decision is one thing and acting on it is another. A yes from the people you asked does not give you a start date, or someone told to begin.
I have run operations inside organizations, and I have seen this more than once. In one, we had a program we had already committed to putting in place, and which was required anyway. Two of us worked out what it needed: who had to be trained, how the reporting and follow-up would work, and where it sat in the budget. We took the plan to three different groups, including the board. Every question was answered. Nothing happened.
It happened when a circumstance required it, and that tested what we had. We had most of it, but not all of it. We had never rehearsed the process, so we pieced parts of it together while it was already unfolding. The best time to test a process is before you need it, and that goes double for an emergency process.
The delay kept costing us. On later occasions we hired the training in each time. Training a few of our own people to train others would have been the cheaper investment.
It is not an unusual story. In a study published in 2002, researcher Paul Nutt followed more than 400 real decisions, and about half were not fully put to use within two years. A third were never used at all.
What does it cost to ask the wrong people, or to skip the right ones?
More than it looks like. Too much input and the wrong input are two sides of the same coin: the loud voices get heard but nothing follows, and the people who would have to act are never asked. Either way, asking feels like progress while the cost shows up later and somewhere else.
Think about who has actually been asked. Some people are loud, and they are being heard, and their input is not leading to action. Others ought to have a say because they are the ones who will do the work, and they have not been asked at all.
Nutt’s research points the same way. Decisions made by involving the people affected succeeded more than 80% of the time, yet that approach was used in only about one decision in five. The cost is not in asking. It is in failing to ask the right people.
In another organization we ran an engagement survey. It took months to share the results. Each team was meant to take its results and make a plan. Very little happened.
What stuck was the cheapest thing on the list: half an hour every couple of weeks for the team to get together and talk, so people knew each other better. It was good, and it built some trust. The bigger issues the survey found were mostly ignored. Fixing them meant investing in technology or training, or having open conversations about what was and was not working. Those cost real money and time.
It is a common pattern. Gallup reported in 2023 that only 8% of employees strongly agree that their organization takes action on surveys. In a 2018 UK workplace study of about 2,000 people, a third of employees reported they had not noticed any change as a result of their employer’s survey, and their engagement scores ran about ten points lower than the UK average. The researcher is careful to say the silence is not what made those scores low. The survey was reporting what working there already felt like. But when nothing visibly happens, it confirms what people suspected: that no one is listening.
Which fix on your list is cheap, and which is expensive? Which one did you do?
Why does a team stop telling you the true thing?
Often because they have learned it does not land. A team that hesitates to raise a question on a low-risk decision may say nothing at all when the stakes are high.
Research from Harvard Business School finds that when people judge speaking up to be unsafe or futile, they say less, and that fear can show up even where the leader has done nothing wrong. So silence is not always a sign of a bad environment. Sometimes speaking up to anyone with authority just feels risky.
I do not think a circling decision always means people feel unsafe. But it is worth asking. If something here were failing, would anyone tell you? If shipping something could hurt someone, would they say so? If everyone is going along to get along, what have you allowed to continue, even if you did not start it?
I have seen good leaders lose their team’s honesty without noticing. They became hard to reach. Standing meetings lapsed, and nobody noticed for months. If you missed a regular meeting, would anyone say so? Whose complaint do you believe: the loudest, or the one closest to the work? When something you said would happen did not, did anyone tell you?
When the front door closes, information finds another route. I kept sending the updates and I asked people I trusted near the leader to carry what mattered. That is not gossip. It is a sign that the direct route is closed.
Who owns the next step?
One person responsible for acting and one accountable for the call. Everyone else is consulted before it is decided, or informed after.
This is where RACI matters. Responsible is who does the work. Accountable is who owns the outcome and makes the call. Consulted is who gives input before the decision. Informed is who is told after.
A stuck decision often has too many people consulted and no one responsible. Everyone has been asked, and nobody has been told to begin. Count the people who have been consulted. Then name the one person responsible for acting. If you cannot, that may be why it is stuck. Bain’s work on decision roles makes the same point with a different tool: one person holds the final call, and too many people giving input slows everything down.
Keep the numbers right. Consult only the people whose input changes the decision. Inform everyone else, as much as they need. Put a date on it.
Here is what that would have looked like for the program I described. We took the plan to three groups. The board’s answer mattered because the budget sat there, so the board would be consulted once. The other groups would be informed. One person would be named responsible for getting our own people trained to train others, with a date for the first session. One person would be accountable for the program as a whole. Same plan, but the training would not have waited for the event.
Then let them do the work. Ownership without authority is only a title. If you hand someone a task and then take it back, you have not given them the job. I make the same point about how much authority to give a fractional COO.
What would I do first?
Find out why it keeps coming back, say yes or no, and make it someone's job to start.
- When the same item keeps returning, ask why, and decide yes or no.
- Know what is moving and what is not. Goals and a dashboard help, so it is not just a feeling. I wrote about EOS Rocks and OKRs for that.
- Build enough trust that someone can say, “We cannot move forward unless we do this.” Treat delay as a risk you account for.
- Ask why you are not hearing the whole story.
- Name the one person responsible, the one accountable and the date.
If you would like a second pair of eyes on a decision that keeps circling, the Stuck on Consensus page has a short free check that names what is actually stalling it, and you can get in touch when you are ready to talk it through.