We Can’t Seem to Decide Anything

When alignment replaces ownership, and why more discussion often makes things worse.

This is the second post in a quarterly series exploring the problems organizations bring us, and what’s often really going on underneath them. In the first post, we looked at why so many organizations conclude they have a strategy problem when something else is actually breaking down. This entry continues that thread.

Most leadership teams don’t describe themselves as indecisive. They describe themselves as collaborative, thoughtful, careful. They circle issues from multiple angles. They make sure everyone has a chance to weigh in. They want buy-in before moving forward.

And yet, somehow, the same questions keep showing up on the agenda.

This is one of the most common patterns we see in organizations that care deeply about doing things well: 

• meetings that feel productive but end without commitment

• conversations that surface real tradeoffs but never resolve them

• a growing list of items that have been “revisited,” “flagged,” or “tabled for further discussion”...sometimes for months.

From the outside, it can look like consensus. From the inside, it feels like drift.

A Familiar Scene

A development director described it to us this way. Her organization had been talking for over a year about whether to sunset a long-standing program that no longer fit their mission. Every leadership meeting touched on it. Every quarter, someone said, “We really need to make a call on this.”

“We’d have a great conversation,” she said. “People were honest. Concerns got named. And then someone would say, ‘Let’s come back to this when we’ve had more time to think.’ And we did. Over and over. For fourteen months.”

Meanwhile, the program kept running. Staff kept being assigned to it. Donors kept being thanked for supporting it. And every time a new initiative came up, the conversation got harder, because the team’s capacity was already spoken for by something no one had actually decided to keep.

When the decision finally got made (by the executive director, alone, between meetings) it landed harder than it needed to. Some staff felt blindsided. Others felt relieved. A few felt both.

None of them felt like the team had decided anything.

The Pattern: When Alignment Becomes a Substitute

There’s a version of decision-making that looks like leadership but functions like avoidance. It usually shows up in organizations with strong cultures, smart people, and a real commitment to inclusion. The intent is good. The pattern is corrosive.

You can usually spot it in a few familiar ways:

• The same topic appears on the agenda three or four meetings in a row, with slightly different framing each time.

• Conversations end with “we’re aligned”, but no one can quite say what was agreed.

• Decisions get described as “leaning toward” or “more or less settled,” rarely as made.

• Items get tabled “until we have more information,” but more information rarely arrives.

• When something does move forward, it’s because someone got tired of waiting, not because the team chose.

What’s actually happening is that two distinct kinds of work are getting collapsed into one another. Evaluating what’s workable is being treated as the same thing as agreeing to move on it. Discussion is being mistaken for commitment.

In the Working Genius framework, those are two different geniuses, and they may belong to two different people. DISCERNMENT is the work of judging whether an idea will hold up; the gut-level sense of what’s sound, what’s missing, what’s off. GALVANIZING is the work of generating real energy behind a direction once it’s chosen. One looks at an idea and asks, “Is this right?” The other turns to the team and says, “Okay, let’s go!”

Healthy teams move through both. Stuck teams keep cycling through the first one and never reach the second.

The Cost: Ownership Diffuses, Friction Builds

When decisions don’t actually land, the work doesn’t stop. It just routes around the gap.

Sometimes a single staff member quietly makes the call, because the work in front of them won’t wait. Sometimes a deadline forces a default, whatever was easiest, or already in motion, becomes the de facto decision. Sometimes a frustrated leader makes a unilateral call after the meeting, and then has to manage the fallout when others assumed they were still being consulted.

None of this is dramatic. It rarely makes it into a meeting recap. But over time, it shapes how the organization actually operates:

• Staff stop bringing decisions forward because they’ve learned the team won’t close them.

• Strong performers start making calls on their own, then get second-guessed when the decision becomes visible.

• Meetings get longer and more frequent, but produce fewer outcomes.

• Tradeoffs that should have been named at the top of the organization get absorbed, quietly, at the bottom.

And here’s the gap that matters most:

• Leadership may see a team that’s thorough, collaborative, careful.

• Staff experience a team that won’t commit, and leaves them to figure out what was actually decided.

That gap is where trust erodes. Not because anyone acted in bad faith, but because the people closest to the work keep absorbing the cost of decisions that were never fully made.

The Insight: This Isn’t a Decision-Making Failure. It’s a Role Failure.

Most teams who struggle with this don’t need a better decision framework. They’ve usually tried several. The problem isn’t process. The problem is that no one on the team is actually doing the work of closing the loop.

When a team is heavy on WONDER, INVENTION, and DISCERNMENT, the early phases of every decision feel rich. Questions get asked. Ideas get refined. Concerns get aired. And then the conversation stalls, because evaluating an idea is not the same as committing to it, and no one in the room is wired to push the team across that line.

GALVANIZING tends to be the missing ingredient. It’s not cheerleading. It’s the willingness to say, out loud, “Here’s what we’re doing. Here’s who owns it. Let’s go.” In organizations stuck in decision paralysis, that voice is often absent — or, just as often, present in only one person, whose energy gets read as steamrolling when they finally use it.

The flip side shows up too. Teams heavy on GALVANIZING and TENACITY tend to commit fast and re-litigate later, because DISCERNMENT never got its turn. The decision feels decisive, then unravels two weeks in when the concerns that didn’t surface in the room start surfacing in hallway conversations.

In both cases, the issue isn’t intelligence or intent. It’s that the work of activating a decision (evaluating it honestly, then committing to it visibly) is being skipped, overloaded onto one person, or handed to someone whose natural wiring isn’t built for it.

This is why “more discussion” so rarely fixes the problem. More discussion compounds what’s already there. If the team’s strength is in evaluation, another meeting produces more evaluation. The decision still doesn’t get made.

A Better Starting Point

Before adding another meeting, another framework, or another round of consultation, it’s worth pausing to ask a different set of questions:

• Of our recurring agenda items, how many are genuinely unresolved, and how many are unresolved because no one is closing them?

• Who on this team is wired to evaluate? Who is wired to commit? Are both voices actually in the room?

• When we say we’re “aligned,” what specifically did we agree to do, by when, and who owns it?

• Where are staff making decisions on our behalf because we haven’t, and what is that costing us?

These questions don’t require a new planning process. They require honesty about what kind of work the team is consistently doing, and what kind of work it’s consistently avoiding.

To support that kind of reflection, we've developed a short diagnostic designed to surface where decision-making is breaking down, and what kind of breakdown it actually is. It takes about five minutes and doesn't require familiarity with any frameworks or assessments. The goal isn't to score your team. It's to help you tell the difference between a team that's genuinely deliberating and one that's avoiding commitment under the cover of discussion.

If this post is resonating, that's a useful place to start.

A Clear Next Step

If you’re reading this and recognizing your last several leadership meetings, you’re not alone. Decision paralysis is one of the most common patterns we see, and it almost never looks like indecision from the inside. It looks like care.

A brief conversation can help you sort out whether:

• Your team needs sharper decision rights and clearer ownership, or

• You’re missing the kind of wiring (in a person, a role, or a working agreement) that turns evaluation into commitment.

If you’d like to explore that, we invite you to reach out to CSR for an initial conversation. No pitch. No prep work required. Just a chance to name what’s actually hard, and see what might help.

Looking Ahead

In the next post in this series, we’ll explore what’s really happening when everyone on the team is busy but nothing seems to be moving and why burnout is so often a work-design problem, not a resilience problem.

About the Author

Patrick Larkin is a seasoned Nonprofit Consultant with over 25 years of leadership experience across various institutions. With a foundation in public horticulture and museum management, he has served on the board of the American Public Gardens Association and as a Peer Reviewer for the American Alliance of Museums. Patrick honed his skills in fundraising, board development, and strategic planning, continually focusing on aligning organizational missions with public needs. He is a Certified Working Genius Consultant.

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