Decision Fatigue at Work Is a Process Problem

I sat across from a VP of operations who had been circling a supply-chain consolidation for four months. On her desk: two consulting firms' 90-page reports that cost $120,000 between them. A risk-assessment heat map. A 47-item register. Minutes from six committee meetings. She had read every page and attended every meeting. She could not tell me which three warehouses to shut.

That is decision fatigue at work. It is not the result of making too many small choices before lunch, or a depleted reservoir of willpower that empties by mid-afternoon. The ego-depletion model behind that claim has not survived replication. What produces the fatigue in workplaces is the gap between the person who must commit and the apparatus that sits between them and the decision. The governance layers, the risk registers, the committee sign-offs, the consultant reports: these are not helping the Decider decide.

I have asked people in organisations how they think the risk department creates value. Few can answer. Those who try do not believe their own response when pressed. The apparatus is tolerated because a regulator requires it or because the board was told it should be there. It is not trusted to produce decisions, because it does not produce decisions.

What decision fatigue at work actually costs

Bain & Company studied the time budgets of 17 large corporations and found that organisations manage financial capital with extreme discipline but leave time entirely unmanaged. Michael Mankins and Eric Garton estimated that corporate bureaucracy costs the United States economy more than $3 trillion annually. That figure includes 12.5 million surplus supervisory roles and 8.9 million subordinates performing low-value process work. They coined the term "organisational drag." I would call it something else: the operating cost of a governance apparatus that nobody can show produces decisions.

I recognise that drag. It looks like risk committees, compliance checklists, heat maps, appetite statements, and board reporting cycles that exist because a regulator expects them, not because a Decider needs them. In every organisation I have worked with that claimed to practise "risk management", the risk process ran on one track and the actual decision ran on another. They never converged. The VP with the 47-item register was stuck on the first track. Nothing in that register told her which warehouses to shut.

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What happens when you strip the apparatus

In 2005, Zhang Ruimin, CEO of the Haier Group, eliminated the entire middle-management layer of an 80,000-person company. Before the change, Haier had twelve layers of hierarchy. A decision about a customer complaint or a supplier contract had to pass through all of them. More than 12,000 middle managers were told to become entrepreneurs within a new structure or leave. The company reorganised into 4,000 microenterprises of fewer than ten people each. Each received full authority: make the decisions, hire your own people, set your own prices, distribute the profits.

The results were not ambiguous. After Haier acquired Sanyo's appliance division, it reversed Sanyo's losses within eight months by applying the same model. When it acquired GE Appliances, double-digit profit growth followed in the first year. Revenue reached approximately $40 billion by 2017. The conventional wisdom said you cannot run a company that size without governance hierarchy. Zhang Ruimin's answer was that the hierarchy was not governance; it was delay.

What Haier removed was precisely what produces decision fatigue at work. Twelve layers meant that the person closest to the customer had no authority to decide. Every judgement had to be escalated through a governance chain that added delay and cost but no certainty. Strip the chain, and decisions happen. The microenterprise model put the decision in front of the person who had the information to make it.

Why decision fatigue at work is not about your calendar

Microsoft surveyed knowledge workers across 31 countries in 2023 and found that 57 per cent of their working day goes to communication: meetings, email, chat. Forty-three per cent goes to the skilled work they were hired to do. Only 35 per cent believed they would be missed in the majority of their meetings. The other sixty-five per cent showed up because the calendar invite told them to. No one in a governance culture declines a calendar invite.

Separate research by Mankins and Garton found that senior executives spend 23 hours a week in meetings. Mid-level managers spend eleven. More than half the working week for executives, in rooms where decisions are discussed but rarely made.

Those numbers explain why the standard advice is useless. "Make important decisions in the morning" assumes there is an uninterrupted morning. There is not. The Decider's calendar is consumed by the apparatus: committee agendas, compliance reviews, reporting cycles, pre-meeting meetings. Most of the people in those rooms know they are not needed, but a governance culture does not permit absence. The meeting is not a decision; it is a governance ritual. The executives who feel it worst are not making too many decisions. They are making too few, because the process will not let them through to one. That is decision fatigue at work.

Five assumptions, not forty-seven items

When we applied the Universal Decision-Making Method to the VP's consolidation, the entire question reduced to five assumptions. Three she already knew the answer to. Two required specific information she could obtain in a week. The 47-item risk register had not been wrong, exactly. It had been irrelevant. None of those 47 items stated what the decision rested on.

In Deciding, Roger Estall and I built the method around a single question: "What are the assumptions we are making here?" That question replaces everything that was on the VP's desk. It asks the Decider to name what must hold true for the decision to work and assess whether confidence in each assumption is sufficient. The "risk management" paraphernalia that had consumed three months of her time was complicated and unnatural. What replaced it was not. No 90-page report required. No $120,000.

The VP made her recommendation to the board within two weeks. Not because she found reserves of mental energy. Because five assumptions are something a person can work with. Forty-seven items on a register are not.

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Grant Purdy is the co-author, with Roger Estall, of Deciding (2020), and the architect of the Universal Decision-Making Method.