It took me three months to make a decision that deserved three days
...and my organization had the skills to move forward without me.
The decision was simple. A team member had left. We needed to decide whether to hire an identical replacement, redistribute the workload, or use the departure to test a different configuration: a freelancer, offshore support, partial automation.
Three clear options. Managers capable of evaluating them. Data available. And yet: three months of status quo. Not because the analysis was complex. Not because people were dragging their feet. Because the decision had to go through me, and I had other fires to put out.
When I finally made the call, the answer was obvious. It had been obvious after three days. The eighty-seven days that followed added nothing except delay, frustration, and a measurable operational cost.
This is not an isolated anecdote. It is a pattern. And if you run a service business, chances are you recognize it.
The invisible bottleneck
In the first edition, I laid out the central thesis of Responsive Management: the limiting factor in service businesses is neither technology nor budget — it is the owner’s ability to continuously recompose the resource mix. This edition addresses the first dimension of that ability: change governance.
Change governance comes down to three questions: who decides what to change? How fast? With what authority?
In most service businesses I observe, the answer to all three is the same: the owner. Alone.
This is understandable. The owner knows the context better than anyone. They carry ultimate responsibility. They often founded or acquired the company. And for years, this centralization worked. It was even an advantage: fast decisions, strategic coherence, no pointless committees.
The problem emerges when the environment accelerates. When change decisions multiply — a departure, an AI opportunity, a client demanding a new capability, an offshore partner to evaluate — the queue inside the owner’s head grows longer. Managers wait. The organization has the skills to move forward, but not the mandate.
What about the executive committee?
Some will think: “It’s different here. Decisions go through our executive committee.” In practice, this does not solve the problem; it relocates it.
Executive committees introduce two distinct blocking mechanisms. The first is temporal: a decision that could be made in three days waits for the next committee meeting, then the minutes validation, then confirmation at the following session. Six weeks pass. The second is political: when everyone validates, no one decides. Responsibility dilutes. Each member waits for the other to take a position. The outcome is the same as the lone-owner model — inaction — but with a collective alibi.
The bottleneck is not about how many people sit around the table. It is about mandate, decision scope, and speed.
What the data says
Helfat and Martin, in a meta-study published in the Journal of Management in 2015, define dynamic managerial capabilities: the ability of managers to create, extend, and modify how their organizations operate. Their conclusion is unambiguous: when the leader monopolizes these capabilities, they become individual bottlenecks rather than distributed resources. The owner’s judgment, however sharp, has limited bandwidth.
MIT CISR data (Van der Meulen and Beath, 2023), collected from 342 organizations, quantifies the cost of centralization. Decentralized companies show net margins 6.2 percentage points higher and growth rates 9.8 points higher than their centralized peers. The gap is significant. It widens further when decentralization is guided by a clearly integrated organizational purpose.
Battisti and Deakins (2021), studying 151 Polish SMEs during Covid-19, confirm that organic structures — those practicing decentralization, welcoming bottom-up ideas, and experimenting — responded more effectively to disruptions than centralized ones.
The findings converge. Decision centralization penalizes performance in measurable ways. And the mechanism is identified: it is not that the owner decides poorly; it is that they decide alone, and their bandwidth is the limiting factor for the entire organization.
Decentralizing without competence: the holacracy lesson
A study of 5,807 employees across 144 German SMEs (Huettermann et al., 2024) adds nuance: transferring decision authority stimulates emergent leadership, but only when direct managers practice empowering leadership. Decentralizing without training middle managers to decide does not produce agility. It produces noise.
I experienced this firsthand. In February 2020, we adopted holacracy at tebicom: constitution signed, circles defined, authority distributed. On paper, it was the exact answer to the owner’s decision bottleneck.
In practice, tensions kept growing. The problem was not the model. It was what was missing underneath: the managerial skills for distributed authority to work. How do you delegate responsibilities when scopes are unclear and decision-making is poorly mastered? Holacracy assumed autonomous and competent managers. Reality was more nuanced.
After four years of mounting tensions, we worked on a new solution in the summer of 2024. In January 2025, we put in place our own corporate governance framework. Holacracy is not abandoned, but bounded: the leader of each circle decides how to apply it within their scope and reports to the CVO. In September 2025, we launched our first leadership and management training program. Two cohorts have completed it so far, with 11 managers trained.
The lesson is clear: distributing authority without investing in managers’ decision-making competence means replacing a bottleneck with chaos. Huettermann et al. confirm it empirically. We lived it for four years.
The competence trap
What makes the decision bottleneck particularly insidious is that it often coexists with competent teams. I have seen organizations where field managers fully mastered their domain, where team members regularly upskilled, where know-how was documented; and where, despite all of this, nothing changed. Because no one had the mandate to decide on a change without the owner’s sign-off.
This is precisely the pattern the Responsive Management Index identifies as a decision bottleneck: high scores in knowledge capture and capability development (dimensions 3 and 4), but low scores in change governance and execution cadence (dimensions 1 and 5). The organization knows how. It is not allowed to.
If you recognize yourself in this description, the problem is not your teams. It is the structure of your decision-making.
Three concrete levers
First lever: create a formal change mandate. Identify two managers who can carry change initiatives without waiting for your green light. Not a vague delegation. An explicit mandate, with a defined scope and real decision authority. Helfat and Martin show that managers at different levels possess heterogeneous decision capabilities; ignoring them means wasting a strategic resource. But — and this is the holacracy lesson — the mandate is not enough. You need to invest in the competence that goes with it.
Second lever: measure decision lead time. How long does it take between the moment a reorganization decision is identified as necessary and the moment it is made? If the answer is “several weeks” or “several months,” you have an objective measure of the bottleneck. MIT CISR data is clear: this lead time correlates with financial performance.
Third lever: institutionalize the post-mortem. When a change project fails or stalls, what happens? If the answer is “we quietly abandon it” or “we wait for the owner to restart it,” the organization does not learn from its failures. Battisti and Deakins show that SMEs that systematically draw lessons from their failures develop stronger adaptive capabilities. The post-mortem is not a luxury. It is an organizational learning mechanism.
A quick test
Two questions are enough to assess your change governance.
When a reorganization decision is needed, how long does it take? If the answer is “months, or never formalized,” the signal is clear.
Who carries the responsibility for driving change in your organization? If the answer is “the owner alone,” you have identified your limiting factor.
These two questions are part of the Responsive Management Index, a 15-question diagnostic I am currently finalizing. Seven minutes to identify where your service business is stuck — and what to change first.
What’s next
The next edition will cover resource recomposition: the core of the Responsive Management thesis. What happens when a team member leaves and, for the first time, you don’t replace them with an identical profile?
In the meantime, if this edition made you think about how change decisions are made in your organization, that is already a first step. The second is to talk about it with your managers.
Lionel Jaquet — CVO @tebicom · Responsive Management · DBA Candidate @GEM