How much time does a verdict devour in your organisation? Not the meeting — the whole arc from first signal to final commitment. Put to executives, the answers run from days to “we’re still on that one.” This study attempts to trade anecdote for measurement.

Over three years, my team shadowed 412 major verdicts inside sixty-eight organisations across six sectors: banking, health, higher education, manufacturing, central government and technology. For each we recorded the trigger, the players, the duration, and — most tellingly — what the duration comprised.

The headline first: the average verdict consumed 54 days. The average thinking inside it — research, argument, honest weighing — consumed six. The remaining forty-eight were delay: waiting on diaries, waiting on documents, waiting on a committee whose quorum kept dissolving, waiting on senior blessing for a ruling everyone had already accepted.

Nine days in ten are not deliberation. They are delay — and delay is designed, which means it can be redesigned.

Four delay snares turned up everywhere. The sign-off queue: rulings sent upstairs for approval that adds no insight, only interval. The document pile: pre-reading so enormous nobody opens it, so meetings re-litigate what the paper settled. The quorum hunt: governance designed for shared hallways, inflicted on diaries scattered across zones. And the unowned middle: the between-meeting weeks when moving the matter forward belongs to nobody.

Sectors differed in style but not in total. Banks dawdled longest over appointments and hurried most on risk limits. Universities stalled over anything crossing institutional frontiers — see my companion case note — and hurried most on academic posts. Technology firms moved fastest and re-opened most, paying a separate tariff: the re-verdict.

Findings at a glance

  • Average verdict: 54 days elapsed, 6 days of genuine thought.
  • Four snares drive most delay: sign-off queues, document piles, quorum hunts, unowned middles.
  • Teams that fix an owner and a deadline move twice as fast.
  • Haste without delivery merely shifts the waiting elsewhere.

The working verdict is intentionally modest, which is why I defend it. Halving delay needs no transformation crusade. It needs an owner, a deadline, papers short enough to be read, and someone posted to the middle weeks. Watch those four for a quarter and the numbers move — in every sector studied, without one exception.

Jordan Ellery

Jordan Ellery is a visiting fellow at the Halloran School of Government. The full paper, method and tables included, is available on request. Request it →