Faulty reasoning signals

• Appeal to Authority - 19.4%
• Indoctrination - 17.7%
• Negativity Bias - 17.2%

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Why The Fastest Executive Teams Often Make The Most Expensive Decisions

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Jul 10, 2026, 08:45am EDT

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Janet M. Harvey, CEO and Founder of inviteCHANGE , advancing enterprise performance through Generative Wholeness leadership.

​Last quarter, I sat with an executive team facing a 90-minute window to make a call on a business unit divestiture. They reached an agreement in 28 minutes. By the next morning, three of the seven members had emailed the CEO with reservations they had kept quiet in the room. Two weeks later, the decision was reopened, and the cost of that rework exceeded what the original decision was meant to save.​

Speed in decision-making is overvalued in many senior teams. Across 30 years of coaching executives on six continents, the most expensive pattern I see is premature resolution. Teams reach an agreement before the real question has surfaced, and the cost shows up later as rework, disengagement and second-order consequences nobody saw coming. Downstream rework is one of the clearest indicators that a decision process is breaking down at the front end.​​

Now, AI is accelerating the problem. Deloitte's "2026 Global Human Capital Trends" survey , which reached over 9,000 leaders across 89 countries, found that "60% of executives now regularly use AI to support their decisions." By 2027, Gartner projects that "half of business decisions will be augmented or automated by AI agents." And Oracle's 2023 "The Decision Dilemma" study of more than 14,000 professionals found that 72% say the volume of data has stopped them from making any decision at all, while 70% of leaders said they would prefer a robot to make decisions for them.​

The Generative Operating System we deploy with enterprise clients treats this as a measurable capability called "paradoxical capacity," which is the ability to hold two conflicting truths in view long enough for a better option to emerge.

​Five Patterns To Assess

Here are five patterns to assess whether an executive team has built that capacity or whether speed is quietly costing them quality.

1. The room reaches agreement before the loudest dissenter has spoken.

Quiet alignment is rarely real alignment. Harvard's Amy Edmondson has documented this: Absence of dissent is often suppression rather than agreement. The rework from forced resolution can cost organizations more than the original decision was meant to save.

A useful protocol: Before any consequential decision closes, the most senior person in the room should ask, "What still needs to be said before we decide?" Then wait in silence for at least 30 seconds. The discomfort of that pause tells you the discipline is working.

2. A binary frames the conversation, and no one challenges it.

"Do we exit this market or double down?" "Restructure now or wait one more quarter?" I've found almost every binary in an executive room is a false choice waiting to be examined.

The most useful contribution in a high-stakes meeting is often 15 seconds and a question: "Is this actually a choice between two things, or is there a third option we have stopped looking for?" Teams that build this habit often experience fewer decision reversals over a four-quarter cycle.

The choice between A and B is rarely the real question. The constraint that makes it feel like A versus B almost always is.

3. A senior leader uses 'let's just decide' to end discomfort.

This phrase is one of the most reliable patterns I track. Discomfort in an executive room often signals that the real question has surfaced. Closing it down too fast forfeits the answer the room was about to find.

When you hear "let's just decide" land in a senior team, ask, "What would you lose by giving this one more round?" The answer is almost always less than the room thinks. Decisions made out of fatigue or impatience tend to come back at the worst possible time.

4. The CEO closes the conversation before everyone has spoken.

In a healthy executive team, every senior voice contributes to every consequential decision. In an unhealthy one, the CEO speaks first, and the rest calibrate around the CEO's tone. The result is nodding heads and a CEO who genuinely believes the team is aligned.

The fix is structural: Establish a norm that the CEO speaks third in any high-stakes decision conversation. Two more junior voices speak first. Track over a quarter how decision quality and durability shift. Many CEOs who run this experiment are surprised by how much intelligence the team had been holding back.

5. Decisions made in the room get reopened by email afterward.

If the same decisions keep coming back across meetings, or if reservations surface in emails after the room closes, the team is failing at the front end. Resolution was forced before the real question had been answered.

Track decision rework over a four-quarter cycle. In my experience, healthy executive teams revisit consequential decisions less than 10% of the time. Teams that resolve tension too quickly revisit at around 20% to 30%. The gap is the cost of premature resolution, and it compounds.

What These Patterns Add Up To

Together, they describe a team that has confused decisiveness with quality. AI will not close that gap. The tools are scaling faster than the capacity to use them well, and that gap is accumulating what Deloitte calls cultural debt , the cost organizations absorb as AI scales faster than accountability structures can keep pace.

Paradoxical capacity is not a software update. The leaders I trust most under pressure have learned that the discipline to stay with a hard question one more round is worth more than the comfort of closing it down. The room still decides.​

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