There is a specific type of silence that fills a boardroom when a CIO reports a project is "Green" (on track), but the CFO knows not a single line of code has gone into production in six months. I call this the Green-Melon Effect: everything looks green on the outside, but cut it open, and it’s deep red on the inside.
I recently walked into a Fortune 1000 aerospace manufacturer facing this exact scenario. Their flagship digital transformation initiative—budgeted at $10M—was stuck. The steering committee met weekly for 90 minutes. They produced 40-page slide decks. They tracked 150 "risks" in a spreadsheet that nobody read. Yet, the project hadn’t hit a milestone in two quarters.
The problem wasn’t technical. The engineering team knew how to build the platform. The problem was Decision Latency.
According to The Standish Group, for every $1M spent on a project, approximately 1,000 decisions must be made. If each decision takes a week to navigate your governance committee, your project mathematically cannot succeed on time. In this specific case, we measured their average decision latency—the time between a blocker being identified and a decision being made—at 14 days.
This is the "Committee Trap." You are Transition Tom, the CIO or VP of Engineering, and you are cornered. You have the budget, you have the team, but you cannot move because every decision requires a pre-meeting, a meeting, and a post-meeting alignment session. Meanwhile, McKinsey data suggests that 70% of digital transformations fail, costing the global economy an estimated $2.3 trillion annually. You are statistically likely to be next unless you change the governance physics.
To unblock the $10M program, we didn’t add more project managers. We fired the Steering Committee. In its place, we installed a radical, 15-minute governance mechanism: The Executive Daily Standup (EDS).
This is not a Scrum standup for developers. It is a decision-forcing event for executives. Here is the exact protocol we used to drop decision latency from 14 days to 24 hours.
Standard agile questions focus on activity ("What did I do yesterday?"). The EDS focuses solely on velocity barriers:
The core mechanic of the EDS is the 24-Hour Rule. If a blocker is raised, the assigned executive must either make the decision on the spot or commit to a decision by the next morning’s standup. "I need to research this" is acceptable only if the research is presented 24 hours later. "I need to check with my team" is forbidden; you are the leader, you represent the team.
This urgency exposes the organization's cross-functional deadlock immediately. In our case study, we found that 60% of "technical" blockers were actually legal or compliance decisions waiting for a signature. By forcing the General Counsel to send a delegate to the EDS for one week, we cleared a four-month backlog of vendor approvals in three days.
Gartner reports that 65% of decisions are more complex than they were two years ago. However, complexity is often a mask for fear. When you force daily resolution, you strip away the fear. In our intervention, the project's "Decision Latency" dropped by 92% within two weeks. The team went from deploying zero features to shipping the MVP alpha in 45 days.
You don’t need permission to change how you meet. If your digital transformation is stuck in committee, execute this reset immediately.
Look at your last 5 "resolved" blockers. Calculate the hours between the initial email/ticket raising the issue and the final decision execution. If the average is >48 hours, your governance is broken. Publish this number to your stakeholders. "We are moving at 14-day cycles in a 24-hour market."
Cancel the weekly 90-minute status meeting. Replace it with the 15-minute EDS invite. Tell the attendees: "I am giving you back 75 minutes of your week. In exchange, I need 15 minutes of intense focus every morning."
Run your first EDS. Someone will try to give a status update. Cut them off. Politely but firmly say, "We can read status in the dashboard. This meeting is only for decisions. What is blocking you from shipping today?"
The first major blocker will surface. Assign it to a decision-maker. Ask, "Can we have a decision by 8:45 AM tomorrow?" Watch the room tension rise. Hold the silence until they say yes.
At the end of the week, tally the decisions made. In our $10M rescue, the team made more decisions in Week 1 of EDS than in the previous two months combined.
We often think project recovery requires heroic effort—working weekends, hiring "10x" developers, or buying new tools. It rarely does. It requires governance simplicity. A $10M program is just a series of $1,000 decisions. If you can make those decisions faster than your competitors, you win. Stop reporting on the weather and start flying the plane.
