THE DEBRIEF: The Room That Couldn't Decide

3.47pm. A construction company's boardroom. Major infrastructure deal on the table.

I've been waiting forty minutes for an answer to a question that should have taken forty seconds.

X or Y. That's it. Two options. One decision.

But nobody in the room will make it.

They're all looking at me.

I'm the lawyer. Sitting outside their organisation. Not privy to their financials, their internal politics, their risk appetite, their board dynamics. And they want me to decide something that will affect the entire direction of their company.

I've seen this before. Many times. And every time, I recognise it for what it is.

It isn't indecision. It's a structural problem with a name.

Getting a Decision vs Making a Decision

After decades working with construction and infrastructure companies, I've come to understand that organisations fall into one of two categories. And the difference between them determines almost everything about how they perform, how they grow, and how they survive.

The first type focuses on getting a decision. The second focuses on making one.

They sound similar. They are not.

Getting a decision is about the outcome, a decision by any means necessary. It doesn't matter how you arrive there. It doesn't matter who makes it or whether they have the information to make it well. What matters is that someone, somewhere, commits to something so the process can move forward.

Making a decision is about the process. How information is gathered, interrogated, and processed. How options are weighed. How the organisation owns the outcome, including when it's wrong.

The room I was sitting in that afternoon was a getting organisation. And it was costing them, in time, in money, in the quality of the deals they were signing.

Why Getting Organisations Look Outside

Here's what I've observed consistently: getting organisations externalise their decisions because internally, blame is part of the culture.

If the decision comes from outside, from the lawyer, the consultant, the external adviser, then when it goes wrong, the blame travels with it. Out of the building. Away from the leadership team. Safely deposited somewhere else.

It feels like protection. It isn't. It's a transfer of both accountability and control.

And in an industry like construction already slow to innovate, already risk-averse, already carrying the weight of contractual complexity, a blame culture doesn't just slow decisions down. It degrades the quality of every decision that follows.

Because the decision-making muscle only grows when it's used. When it's tested. When the organisation is close enough to the outcome to learn from it.

You cannot improve a process you've outsourced.

What Making Organisations Do Differently

The construction companies I love working with and there are some, have a decision-making process. It may not be perfect. It may be messy. But it exists, it sits inside the organisation, and people trust it enough to use it.

When I work with a making a decision organisation, I can do my job. I provide legal analysis, flag risk, offer alternative structures. And then, crucially they decide. They pull the levers. They own the outcome.

These organisations understand something that getting organisations don't: not every decision will be right. Mistakes will be made. But the organisation that owns its mistakes is the organisation that learns from them, refines the process, and makes better decisions next time.

The ownership is the point. Not because it protects the leadership, but because it keeps the intelligence inside the business where it belongs.

The Invisible Clause Operating in Every Getting Organisation

There is an unwritten rule sitting underneath every organisation that externalises its decisions.

It sounds like this: if something goes wrong, it shouldn't be our fault.

That's the invisible clause. And like all invisible clauses, it shapes every decision that follows, without anyone naming it, acknowledging it, or choosing it consciously.

It shapes who gets called into the boardroom. What questions get asked. Whose opinion carries weight. And most expensively, it shapes how long everything takes.

Because passing the buck has a cost. And in construction, where time is money and decisions live or die in the terms of the contract, that cost compounds quietly until it becomes catastrophic.

The Contract Note

Your decision-making process cannot sit outside your organisation.

If it does, you don't control it. You can't monitor it, interrogate it, or improve it. You can only react to it, after the fact, when the cost is already counted.

The maturity of an organisation is not measured by the size of its projects.

It's measured by whether it can look at X and Y and decide.

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Because Your Life is a Contract™. And so is your business.

PatriciaHaywoodEsq.com — Invisible Clauses: What the contract doesn't say.