Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
Categories: Decision Making
It’s a fresh year, fresh budgets and a big long list of management ‘must dos’. However, I don’t know about you, but all my projects are the same. In my experience, most Januarys aren’t clean slates, they’re continuations. Most of my colleagues aren’t starting shiny new initiatives either. We’ve still got a lot to finish off!
January is a reset point, not a restart, so here are 5 questions that help you re-orientate when you open your laptop on some half-finished work.
What has quietly become harder since last year?
Constraints creep in gradually. Processes get…sludgier. There’s more organisational noise. Look for tasks that are taking longer than expected. Dependencies that feel more weighty. Decisions that seem to involve more people than ever before or that are struggling to get made at all.
This isn’t about blame – it’s just about surfacing some of the tricky stuff so you can tackle it head on.
What assumptions are we still working from?
Look back at that assumptions list. It’s probably shifted a bit, right? Once it’s baked into your plan, it’s hard to see that assumption at all.
Some of my commonly-used assumptions include:
- We’ll have business support and stakeholder engagement
- The team will be available
- Funding will be made available.
Who is more (or less) influential now?
Obviously we are not going to be calling people out by saying they are not influential to their faces, but it’s worth some quiet reflection individually or with trusted team members. Some people shift in roles, or their role definition shifts. Organisational influence shifts faster than org charts, so your key influencers might have moved.
Look for the people who block or unblock decisions, stakeholders whose opinions now carry more weight and any informal influencers.
What’s draining effort without adding value?
Look for things that you are still doing as a team because it got started last year and hasn’t been looked at since.
For me, that’s weekly team meetings. We have shifted them to fortnightly because that works better.
What decision are we postponing?
Avoided decisions often create more problems and delays than bad decisions. January exposes the decisions we didn’t make at the end of last year because we said, “let’s circle back in the new year”. Suddenly, the new year is here and those decisions still aren’t made.
Look for trade offs between scope and timelines, resources you need but haven’t asked for, issues that you should be deciding about escalating. Decide what info is actually missing or what the decision is and go out and get it. Remember, you don’t necessarily need every tiny piece of the puzzle before you move forward and most decisions can be undone if they turn out to be too wrong.
You don’t need a workshop or a slide deck to chat through these with a colleague. You don’t even necessarily need to talk to anyone else – mull them over while you get a coffee at the machine or in the 10 minutes between calls when you can’t really start anything else.
The point is to tidy up and feel aligned on these questions to help you see clearly where you are and what you can do to prevent months of friction later. Perhaps just pick one and see how you get on?
Posted on: January 12, 2026 12:00 AM |
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