My business partner, Jennifer Curley, forwarded me Jim VandeHei’s Axios piece yesterday with a note: “KayAnn, really interesting piece on strategy and ability to plan or not plan more than 6 weeks out. This speaks to what you have been telling me.” She’s right. It does. For the past two years, I’ve been seeing the same pressure in boardrooms and C-suite conversations. Leaders have less visibility into what comes next and more pressure to move now. VandeHei has a good name for it: post-processable velocity. But there’s another consequence of that velocity that I keep seeing: The less certainty leaders have about the future, the more important it becomes to make sure the decision underneath the work is actually settled. I think of that as decision integrity. By that I mean something basic: Does the organization actually know what it has decided? Have leaders accepted the trade-offs? Do they agree on what they’re trying to accomplish? Is the work following the decision, or substituting for it? Too often, it’s the latter. The pressure to do something When the future gets harder to read, activity can feel like the answer. Start the transformation. Build the communications plan. Stand up the workstream. Launch the initiative. Do something. Those things create movement people can see. But a decision is harder. Someone has to make the call, accept what comes with it, and own the outcome. So execution gets ahead of judgment. I saw this with an international technology company preparing to enter the U.S. market. A 50-state procurement audit was conducted to prioritize market entry targets. There was one problem. The company hadn’t yet fully committed to entering the U.S. market. The procurement work wasn’t a bad idea. The sequence was wrong. I’ve seen versions of the same problem elsewhere. A transformation launches before leaders have decided what the organization is becoming, or what they’re willing to leave behind. A communications plan gets requested before anyone has agreed on the decision it’s supposed to explain. Different work. Same problem. The organization started moving before leadership made a decision. Why communications finds the problem Communications often discovers the gap because it has to explain the decision. The assignment arrives as messaging, stakeholder engagement, or reputation management. The team starts asking the questions it needs answered to do the work. What are we announcing? Why are we doing it? What changes? Who wins? Who loses? What are we willing to defend? And suddenly the problem becomes visible. It’s an unresolved leadership question wearing the clothes of a communications problem. No communications strategy can solve that. It can explain a decision, build support for it, and help an organization navigate the consequences. But leadership still has to decide. What we’ve changed Post-processable velocity doesn’t mean a good decision expires in six weeks. It means leaders need to check the route more often. Our operating principle: Less than a month risks reacting to noise. Four to six weeks is recalibration. Much longer risks navigating from stale assumptions. So we keep the direction, make the next quarter concrete, and every four to six weeks ask: What changed? What did we learn? Which assumptions still hold? Do we need to change? Usually, the answer isn’t to remake the decision. It’s to adjust how you get there. That’s also why we pressure-test the choice before execution begins. What are we actually trying to accomplish? What assumptions are we making? Who has power over the outcome? What could go wrong? What are we willing to defend? A strong decision gives you something stable to navigate from. The bottom line Speed doesn’t make strategy less important. It makes decision integrity more important. When leaders can’t see as far ahead, they need to be clearer about what they’re deciding now, what they’re betting on and what would make them change course. Strategy, execution and communications all matter. None can compensate for a decision leadership hasn’t actually made. Before asking how fast the organization can move, make sure leadership has made the decision underneath the work. Otherwise, speed doesn’t create progress. It accelerates the mistake. 📈 If you’re a CEO, board member, or senior leader facing a consequential decision, Curley Company’s High-Stakes Decision Advisory helps leadership teams pressure-test the choice before they lock in the strategy, execution plan, or communications approach. Get full access to Clear Thinking with KayAnn at kayannconversations.substack.com/subscribe
