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Senior leaders in one organisation were spending forty hours a week deciding who works on what. Preston Chandler flipped the staffing model in a couple of months and the resourcing meetings disappeared.
Preston runs global strategic operations at WPP, a holding company of around 100,000 people, and co-owns Centered. He has spent two decades pulling decisions out of committees and handing them to the one person who should own them. In this episode, he explains why a slow decision that turns out right costs an organisation more than a fast one that turns out wrong, why the lag never shows up in any report, and what empowerment theatre looks like when a leader says "you own this" and then asks for the work to come back for approval.
You will hear what happened when one creative leader told his teams to stop bringing him work for sign-off, why Preston thinks RACI charts should be retired, what leader-to-doer ratios reveal about an organisation that has stopped moving, and why pouring AI into a company that cannot decide creates a traffic jam rather than speed. Santi closes with where decision making sits inside the four productivity vectors and the sixteen elements, and why it is the element that matters for medium and large companies.
Take one decision your team made last quarter, trace every step it went through, and ask whether one person could have made it on day one. That single exercise is the whole episode in practice.
1. A slow decision is still a decision. You decided not to change, and the opportunity passed.
2. Companies that decide faster also learn from their decisions faster.
3. Decision lag is a real cost that no leader volunteers as a metric, because it makes them look bad.
4. Empowerment with a mandatory approval step at the end is not ownership. It is a delay with a nicer name.
5. Decisions by committee have no owner. Name the one person on the hook, or stop the effort entirely.
6. Responsibility and accountability cannot be split, which is why Preston would retire the RACI chart.
7. Leader-to-doer ratios of roughly one to two signal an organisation protecting itself rather than shipping work.
8. AI adds options at speed. An organisation that cannot choose gets slower, not faster.
Preston Chandler, Centered: https://centered.work/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prestonchandler/
YouTube, Breakthrough Innovation: https://www.youtube.com/@BreakthroughInnovation
The Agile Code (free PDF): https://46125168.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/46125168/Site%20Documents/TheAgileCode_R5.pdf
Earlier appearance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPrmv9LF6q8
Books mentioned: The Agile Code, Breakthrough Innovation, ADAPT (forthcoming), The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch
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