I remember sitting in a quarterly planning session about four years ago, watching a slide deck cycle through the same three options we’d been weighing for the better part of six months. The engineering team was frustrated. The product team was frustrated. The stakeholders were frustrated. Nobody said it out loud, but we all knew what was happening: the decision had become too expensive to make.

We’d spent so long analysing the options that making a choice now meant admitting the analysis had taken too long. So we kept analysing. We commissioned another discovery. We ran more workshops. We scheduled a follow-up to the follow-up. And whilst we were doing all of that, the clock was running – salaries accumulating, competitors moving, customers waiting.

What nobody in that room could see was the number. The actual, real, ticking cost of the wait. I’ve been thinking about that ever since.

Indecision doesn’t feel like a decision

This is the core of the problem. Deciding not to decide feels like prudence. It feels like rigour. It feels like the responsible thing to do when the stakes are high and the options are complex. In technology leadership especially, there’s an entire professional vocabulary for it – due diligence, further discovery, aligning stakeholders, building consensus. These are real things that matter. They’re also, frequently, cover.

I’ve been guilty of it myself. I once delayed a platform decision for so long that the original options were no longer viable – the market had moved, the pricing had changed, two of the vendors we’d been evaluating had pivoted entirely. We ended up making a worse decision under pressure than we would have made comfortably six months earlier. The irony was that we’d been so determined to make the right call that we’d forfeited the right conditions to make it.

The thing about indecision is that it presents itself as the absence of action. It isn’t. It’s an active choice – to keep all options open, to avoid accountability, to defer the moment when someone has to be wrong. And like all choices, it has a cost. Most organisations just never look at the bill.

Technology leaders are especially vulnerable

There are good reasons why indecision tends to compound in technology organisations. The decisions are genuinely complex. The consequences of a wrong call can be significant and long-lasting. The people making them are, by disposition, analytical – trained to look for edge cases, to stress-test assumptions, to find the thing everyone else missed.

All of that is valuable. It becomes a liability when it’s applied in the wrong direction – when the rigour that should be applied to the problem gets applied instead to the decision-making process itself. When the governance structure is the product.

I’ve worked with brilliant technology leaders who ran the most elegant, thorough, well-documented decision processes I’ve ever seen. They produced options papers. They ran weighted scoring matrices. They presented to steering groups. And they were slow – painfully, expensively slow – in ways that weren’t always visible until the damage was done.

Speed isn’t the opposite of quality. Indecision isn’t the opposite of impulsiveness. The effective technology leaders I’ve known – the ones who consistently delivered, who built things that lasted, who retained good people – made decisions at a pace that matched the cost of waiting. They understood that every day without a decision was itself a decision.

The meeting that decides to have another meeting

There’s a particular pathology I’ve encountered at every organisation I’ve worked in, and I suspect you’ll recognise it. The meeting that ends not with a decision but with a follow-up. The slide deck that goes through three rounds of reviews before anyone notices the underlying question hasn’t been answered. The Confluence page that accumulates commentary until it collapses under the weight of its own caveats.

These are symptoms, not causes. They happen because the cost of continuing to deliberate feels lower than the cost of being wrong. Nobody gets blamed for scheduling another workshop. People definitely get blamed for making a call that turns out to be incorrect.

So the incentive structure quietly selects for inaction. Not through malice, not through incompetence – through entirely rational self-preservation, compounded across a room full of intelligent, well-meaning people who’ve all unconsciously reached the same conclusion about what the safe move is.

Changing this requires more than good intentions. It requires making the cost of waiting as visible and immediate as the cost of being wrong.

What stories can do that spreadsheets can’t

I’ve sat in rooms where someone has shared a slide with a number on it. “This decision, if we delay another quarter, will cost us approximately £2.4 million in lost revenue.” The number lands. People nod. Then someone asks a clarifying question about the methodology, and the conversation drifts, and the slide advances, and the meeting ends.

The number was true. It just wasn’t felt. It sat on a slide, inert and past-tense, a projection from a model. It didn’t breathe.

The most effective thing I’ve done in rooms like that – and it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure this out – is to make the cost present tense. Not “this will cost us £2.4 million.” But: “right now, as we talk, this is costing us £340 per minute. We’ve been in this room for forty minutes. That’s £13,600 since we sat down.”

Something shifts when the cost is live. When it’s not a forecast but a fact. When the number on the screen ticks upward while you watch. It changes the quality of the conversation. It changes what feels acceptable. It changes what it means to leave without a decision.

This is why I built the Indecision Clock. Not as a gimmick, and not as a way to manufacture urgency where none exists. But as a tool for doing the thing I wish I’d had in that planning session four years ago: making the cost of waiting impossible to ignore.

How to use it without making enemies

A word of caution, because I’ve seen this go wrong. There’s a version of this that’s coercive. That uses the ticking number as a cudgel – look how much money you’ve wasted, make a decision. That manufactures pressure to short-circuit legitimate deliberation. That’s not what this is for, and it will backfire spectacularly if you use it that way.

The effective version is transparent and collaborative. You build the clock openly, in front of the team, so everyone can see the assumptions behind it. You discuss whether the numbers feel right. You use it as a shared language for the conversation, not as an accusation.

Done well, it does something interesting: it changes who’s being held accountable. The question stops being “why hasn’t this person made a decision yet?” and starts being “what would we need to know to make this decision today?” The first question generates defensiveness. The second generates progress.

I’ve also found it useful not as a meeting prop, but as a persistent artefact. A shared link in the Slack channel for a stalled initiative, ticking quietly in the background. A clock shared in a project update. A URL in the agenda of the next planning session. It doesn’t need to be announced or dramatised. It just needs to be there, doing its job.

The decisions that didn’t get made

Here’s the thing I keep coming back to. In my career, I can point to a small number of decisions I made that turned out to be wrong. I learned from all of them. Some of them were expensive. None of them were catastrophic.

What I can’t easily point to are the costs of the decisions that didn’t get made. They don’t leave a paper trail. They don’t show up in a post-mortem. They disperse quietly across quarters and headcounts and missed opportunities, until they become the ambient temperature of an organisation that’s moving a bit slower than it should, building a bit less than it could, retaining a bit fewer of the people who had somewhere better to be.

That cost is real. It’s just invisible – until you build a clock for it.

Building your Indecision Clock

The clock has five modes, each designed for a different kind of stalled decision. Here’s how I think about which one to reach for.

The Salary Clock is the most universally applicable. You configure it by headcount and seniority band – juniors, mid-level, seniors, leadership – and it calculates the combined hourly cost of everyone involved in, or blocked by, the decision. Use this when the cost is fundamentally about people’s time: a team waiting on architectural direction, a hiring freeze that nobody’s formally decided to end, a reorg that’s been announced but not resolved. It’s the most direct way to make the invisible salary spend visible.

The Revenue Clock is for decisions with a clear commercial consequence. A pricing change that’s been workshopped for months. A new product feature that would materially improve conversion. A partnership that keeps getting pushed to the next quarter. You estimate the revenue foregone per day, week, or month, and the clock normalises it to the second. The number that results is often alarming in a way that a quarterly projection simply isn’t.

The Cost Clock covers hard costs and lost opportunities that don’t fit neatly into revenue: the infrastructure spend accumulating on a contract nobody’s decided to renegotiate, the licensing fee for a tool the team stopped using six months ago but nobody’s formally cancelled, the penalty clause ticking on a delayed delivery. If it’s costing money and a decision would stop it, this is the mode.

The Customer Clock is the one I’d use when the human cost matters as much as the financial one. How many customers are affected? How often are they experiencing the consequence? Is there a monetary value to each impact? This works particularly well for product decisions where the instinct is to keep iterating – where shipping something imperfect feels riskier than the ongoing cost of shipping nothing. Seeing the number of affected customers tick upward in real time reframes that trade-off quickly.

The Competitor Clock is the most qualitative of the five, and perhaps the most useful in a board or exec setting. You’re not tracking a financial cost directly – you’re tracking elapsed time of competitive disadvantage. How long has your competitor had a feature you don’t? How long have they been in a market you’re still evaluating? You can optionally attach a rate to it, but even without one, the elapsed time display is a powerful thing to put on a screen.

A few practical notes on getting it right. The numbers don’t need to be perfect – they need to be defensible and directionally honest. If you’re using the salary clock, err on the side of conservative estimates; a number that people can challenge is more useful than one they can dismiss. Build it openly if you can, so the assumptions are shared rather than handed down. And when you share the link, resist the urge to editorialize. The clock does the talking.

P.S. One final thing. The tool lets you set a future start date, which makes it useful not just for decisions that are already stalled but for decisions you’re about to walk into. Set the clock to the start of the meeting. Share the link in the agenda. Walk into the room with everyone already watching the number tick. It’s a remarkably effective way to establish that today is the day this gets resolved.

Get to building. The clock is ticking.