For the first two years, every decision at the company I ran got the same treatment: a meeting, a document, three more meetings. It felt thorough. It was mostly theatre.
What changed wasn't a framework. It was three questions, asked in order, before anything else happens.
1. Does this need a decision, or a default?
Most of what arrives dressed as a decision is actually a default waiting to be named. "Which project management tool should we use" is rarely a decision - it's whichever one the team already uses for something adjacent, made official.
2. Who is actually affected, and did we ask them?
Not "who should be in the room" - who is affected. Those are different lists, and the second one is almost always shorter and more specific than the first.
3. What do we lose by waiting a week?
Almost nothing is as urgent as it feels in the meeting where you're deciding it.
If the honest answer is "nothing," the decision waits. If the answer is real - a contract expires, a hire will take another offer - it moves immediately, without another round of consensus-building.
None of this is clever. It's mostly a way of admitting that most of our decision-making overhead was never about decision quality. It was about feeling responsible. The filter doesn't make you feel responsible. It just gets out of the way.
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