In Pursuit of Better Decisions

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Lessons Learned   Organizational Culture   Organizational Project Management   Strategy  

Do you know any business leaders who think that they are bad at decision-making? No, me either. So why is it that so many organizations fail to deliver on a significant percentage of the strategic initiatives that those leaders have carefully developed, approved and funded? And why has that situation persisted for decades?

Kaplan and Norton’s book The Balanced Scorecard that suggested 90% of organizations fail to execute on their strategy was published in 1996, yet the Balanced Scorecard Institute reported as recently as October 2023 that 67% of well formulated strategies are still failing.

Both of those numbers relate specifically to execution, but that doesn’t let leadership off the hook. We can all think of projects in our own careers that were doomed to failure before they started, and others that were sunk by bad leadership decision making during planning and delivery.

So, are we all surrounded by leadership incompetence? I think it’s a little more complicated than that.

Good decisions are difficult
There’s a lot more to success or failure than simply good or bad decision-making, but we have to acknowledge that the decisions organizations make (which really means the decisions that their leaders make) have a major impact on the success or failure of projects, programs, etc.

Whether it’s the approval of a project in the first …

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