Complexity in decision-making: how to decide faster without becoming reckless
- Hans Smellinckx
- 4 days ago
- 3 min read
One of the sentences I hear most from CEOs is: “It’s all become so complex.”
They’re not wrong. If you’re leading a SME or scale-up today, you’re juggling:
markets that shift faster than your planning cycles,
a flood of data and dashboards,
people with very different expectations inside your company,
banks, investors, family, regulators… all with their own angle.
Decision-making in that environment is not straightforward. But the real problem is often not the complexity itself. It’s how we respond to it.
I’ve sat in plenty of rooms where decisions die slowly. You recognise the scene: ten smart people, thick slide decks, long discussions, and in the end someone says, “Let’s collect some more input and come back to it next time.” The topic returns again and again, slightly reshaped, never resolved. Everyone is busy, nobody is really leading.
From the outside, it looks careful. On the inside, it’s exhausting.
Why decisions slow down as companies grow
When I work with CEOs in SMEs and scale-ups, I see a few recurring forces at play.
First, there are simply more voices. At the beginning, you decided with a co-founder and maybe a finance person. Now you have a full management team, perhaps a board, and key people you don’t want to alienate. You start optimising for “nobody being upset” instead of “the company moving forward”.
Second, there is more information. Reports, tools, external studies, expert opinions. The more input you have, the easier it becomes to wait for just one more report that will make things crystal clear. Spoiler: it never does.
Third, there is more to lose. When you were small, a wrong bet hurt but it didn’t feel existential. With more revenue, more people and more reputation at stake, the fear of being wrong grows quietly in the background. So you hide it under polite phrases: “We need a more thorough analysis”, “Let’s see how the market evolves”, “We’ll revisit this next year.”
All understandable. None of them help you lead.
Deciding faster without losing your mind
In “100 Days to Make Your Mark as a CEO” I don’t pretend to have a magic framework that makes complexity disappear. What I do suggest, especially in a 100-day window, is to work on what I call your decision hygiene.
That sounds fancy, but it’s mostly about going back to basics.
For each important decision, force clarity on the following:
What exactly are we deciding? Not “our strategy for the next three years”, but something like: “Do we focus our sales efforts on segment X or Y in the next 12 months?”
Who owns this decision? Not “we as a team”, but one person who ultimately has to say yes or no after listening.
By when do we decide? Put a real date on it instead of “later this quarter”.
What are we optimising for? Speed? Risk reduction? Cash? Learning? You can’t maximise everything at once.
When you do this, two things happen. The first is that some discussions simply shrink. People realise they were talking past each other because nobody had framed the choice properly. The second is that the emotional part of the decision becomes visible. Fear of conflict, fear of being blamed, fear of losing face. Once you can name that, you can work with it.
Deciding faster doesn’t mean ignoring those fears. It means acknowledging them and still moving.
The cost of not deciding
Every time you postpone a decision in your company, you’re not staying neutral. You’re making an invisible choice:
to keep burning time and energy on old projects,
to keep people confused about what matters,
to keep opportunities on hold while others move.
I’ve seen SMEs and scale-ups in Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent, Amsterdam and Rotterdam lose years this way. They weren’t out-competed on product. They were out-competed on courage and decisiveness.
The good news is that you don’t have to fix everything at once. In your next 100 days, you can pick two or three high-impact decisions that have been floating around for too long. Frame them clearly, define ownership and timing, and commit to landing them – even if the outcome is not perfect.
You’ll notice that your organisation relaxes a bit when decisions are actually made. People don’t need you to be infallible. They need you to be clear.
Complexity isn’t going away
The world won’t become simpler next year. Your business won’t magically de-complexify itself. But you can become a CEO who knows how to move through complexity instead of getting stuck in it.
If you want a practical place to start, take one current decision that’s been bouncing around for months and write down, on a single sheet of paper: what we are really deciding, what the options are, what the main risks are, and what we’ll regret more in two years – having moved or having waited.
Sometimes that one page is all the “extra analysis” you needed.
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