You have the budget. You have the mandate from the Board. You have a roadmap that promises to revolutionize your supply chain or customer experience by Q3. Yet, six months in, your status updates are a masterclass in creative writing. The project is marked "Green," but nothing has shipped. No code is in production. No value has been realized.
You are trapped in the Consensus Paradox.
For "Transition Tom"—the CIO or VP of Engineering brought in to fix a stalled digital initiative—this is the most dangerous phase. You aren't fighting technical debt yet; you are fighting governance debt. You are sitting in bi-weekly Steering Committee meetings where 12 people have the power to say "no," but no single person has the authority to say "yes."
The data confirms your frustration. According to Bain & Company's 2024 analysis, a staggering 88% of business transformations fail to achieve their original ambitions. They don't fail because the technology didn't work. They fail because the decision-making velocity slowed to a crawl, strangled by a committee structure designed to avoid risk rather than ship value.
If you are waiting for unanimous approval from Legal, Compliance, Finance, and Operations before you deploy the next sprint, you have already failed. You just haven't admitted it yet.
The instinct of every corporate organism under stress is to add more stakeholders. We call this "alignment." In reality, it is dilution. When you invite more people to the table to "socialize" a decision, you are mathematically guaranteeing delay.
Gartner research reveals a chilling statistic for the enterprise operator: 94% of business decisions now involve six or more stakeholders. As that number climbs, the probability of a high-quality, high-velocity decision drops precipitously. When you hit 10 stakeholders, decision effectiveness effectively hits zero.
We see this play out in three specific dysfunctions:
This deadlock is not free. It is a silent EBITDA killer. Gartner estimates that poor governance costs the average organization $12.9 million annually. For a PE-backed portfolio company, that is $12.9M of destroyed enterprise value, purely because you couldn't get the room to agree on the definition of "Customer LTV."
You cannot solve this with better meeting agendas. You must solve it with Operational Engineering. You need to shift from a "Permission Culture" to a "Ship and Fix" culture. As we discussed in Why 70% of Digital Transformations Fail, the root cause is almost always a lack of clear decision rights.
To rescue a stalled transformation, you must stop being a diplomat and start being an operator. You need to break the committee to save the project. Here is the 3-step protocol we use to fix stalled IT projects in 30 days.
Audit your recurring governance meetings. Who is in the room? Apply Amazon's "Two Pizza Rule": if the group is too big to be fed by two pizzas, it is too big to decide. Cut the attendee list by 50%. Move the removed stakeholders to an automated weekly "Informed" email. If they complain, ask them: "Are you willing to sign your name to the P&L impact of a 3-week delay?"
Consensus is a myth. You do not need everyone to agree; you need them to align. explicitely introduce the "Disagree and Commit" protocol. In meetings, allow fierce debate for 20 minutes. Then, the Single Decider (usually you, Tom) makes the call. Record the dissenters in the minutes if it makes them feel safer, but move the project forward immediately.
Force the issue. Identify the smallest shipable unit of value—a single feature, a specific data migration, a pilot dashboard. Set a 30-day deadline to push it to production. If the committee cannot align to unblock this small release, the project is effectively dead, and you should recommend killing it to preserve capital. This ultimatum often shocks the system into action.
Real governance is not about slowing down to ensure safety; it is about building the guardrails that allow you to drive fast without crashing. For dismantling cross-functional deadlock, you must be the friction-remover, not the meeting-scheduler. If you don't unstick this now, the market will unstick it for you—by making your business irrelevant.
