The Hidden Cost of "Let's Circle Back"

Unresolved decisions are the quiet drag on otherwise healthy companies.

I've noticed a larger pattern working with operators over the last six months. Plans look solid. Teams are executing. But output stays flat.

The problem is not effort. It is decision ownership.

At a $75M industrial distributor, leadership met weekly to discuss their new customer tiering strategy. Week one: "We need more data." Week three: "Let's align with operations first." Week seven: "Can we revisit the assumptions?" By month three, two competitors had rolled out similar programs and were winning accounts. The decision was never made. It was discussed to death.

When we audited their last 30 days of leadership discussions, fewer than one in three decisions had a single owner, a documented rationale, or a committed action. The rest lived in Slack threads, meeting notes, and "let's circle back."

Teams are moving faster now. Tools are better. Workflows are tighter. But decision hygiene has not kept pace. What used to resolve itself in hallway conversations now sits in limbo across three time zones and five stakeholders.

Why it matters now: Speed without clear ownership does not create momentum. It creates expensive rework. Sales waits on pricing. Marketing waits on positioning. Operations waits on capacity calls. Revenue does not stall because people are slow. It stalls because no one owns the call.

What to do this week:

The cost of a bad decision is almost always lower than the cost of no decision.

Dust: AI trained on your company's knowledge, not the internet

Dust is a platform that lets you build custom AI agents connected to your company's actual data: Slack threads, Google Drive, SOPs, Notion, meeting notes, past decisions.

Why companies should try it: Most teams lose weeks per year relitigating decisions that were already made. Someone new joins. A cross-functional project starts. The question comes up again: "Why did we decide X?" The answer is buried somewhere in a Slack channel from six months ago, and no one can find it.

Dust solves institutional memory loss. You connect it to your knowledge bases, and it builds agents that can answer company-specific questions in seconds. Not generic AI answers. Your answers, grounded in your documents and context.

Why it works: When decision history is searchable, teams stop reopening settled debates. More importantly, it shifts the default from "let's schedule a meeting to discuss" to "let's check what we already decided and why."

Pricing: $29/user/month (Pro plan) with a 14-day free trial. Enterprise pricing available for teams over 100.

Try it here: https://dust.tt

Default belief: Alignment creates speed.
Flip: Ownership creates speed. Alignment follows.

Many leadership teams over-invest in alignment to avoid friction. Consensus feels responsible. It is often just slow.

One CEO changed a single habit. Instead of asking, "Are we aligned?" he asked, "Who owns this, and what happens if we are wrong?" Debate improved. Decisions stuck. Trust increased because accountability was visible.

The shift was subtle but structural. By naming the owner first, the team stopped performing consensus and started practicing accountability. Disagreement became safer because the path forward was clear. The decision maker could gather input, weigh the risk, and commit.

Why it matters: Alignment without ownership is comfort. Ownership without alignment is chaos. The sequence matters. When you start with alignment, you're negotiating until everyone feels safe. When you start with ownership, you're clarifying who carries the decision and what success looks like.

How to apply it:

Speed is a function of responsibility, not harmony.