Decision Velocity in Your First 90 Days

Getting the Lay of the Land as a Leader, Without Slowing the Business Down

Blog by Kim Scribner

As a leader in a new role, have you ever found yourself caught between choosing to learn the business and moving it forward? What if you didn’t have to choose.

In fact, in your first 90 days, the job is not simply to “get the lay of the land.” It is to understand the land fast enough that your organization does not miss the next opportunity in the market.

That is where decision velocity matters.

In our recent podcast episode on the topic, one idea kept surfacing: organizations rarely lose momentum because they lack intelligence. They lose momentum because decisions get stuck. They stall in layers, meetings, requests for more data, and the often-silent hope that waiting will make the right answer more obvious. History and experience will tell us it usually does not. It just makes the window smaller.

A recent HBR article noted that high-performing private equity-backed CEOs do not win by being reckless, they win by:

• Creating strategic clarity early

• Focusing the organization on a few priorities that matter

• Installing operating rhythms that speed execution, and

• Building cultures where accountability and trust coexist

Put simply, they make it easier for the individuals inside the organization to make decisions, reducing friction and increasing speed to impact.

As you enter a new organization, you’re not just inheriting a strategy, you’re inheriting a decision-making system. And if that system is slow, the market will not wait for you to finish your listening tour.

Stop treating “understanding the business” as a passive exercise

Many leaders spend their first months collecting information, meeting stakeholders, reviewing decks, and trying not to move too quickly. While that instinct is understandable, there’s a difference between learning and delaying.

The fastest way to understand an organization is to study how it makes decisions. Those patterns tell you more than the org chart ever will.

Here’s what you’re trying to understand:

• What decisions take too long here?

• What approval do you need for that you don’t think should require approval?

• Where do opportunities get stuck?

• What information do people always say they need, but rarely use?

• Which decisions are reversible, but treated as irreversible?

That is where decision debt lives.

The first 30 days: Create clarity before you create change

What private-equity and start up leaders understand is that strategy cannot remain abstract. It must be translated into a small number of priorities the organization can use. That matters because slow decision-making is often a clarity problem disguised as a process problem. People hesitate when they do not know what matters most, escalate when priorities conflict, and ask for more data when the real issue is uncertainty about direction.

In your first 30 days, your goal is not to have every answer. Your goal is to reduce ambiguity.

Clarity is not control. It is a decision accelerant.

Days 30 to 60:  Move decisions closer to the work

This is where intent-based leadership becomes especially useful. The idea is simple: instead of training people to wait for permission, leaders create the conditions for people to think, declare intent, and act responsibly within clear guardrails. That shift matters because organizations do not become faster when leaders make every decision personally. They become faster when the people closest to the information are trusted to make more of them.

In practice, as an individual contributor, that means replacing “Can I do this?” with “I intend to do this, because…”

That small language change does something important - it forces ownership, surfaces reasoning, and invites coaching instead of dependency.

For a new leader, this can become a powerful operating habit:

• Ask teams to bring intent, not just issues.

• Require the rationale, risks, and expected outcome.

• Clarify which decisions they own, which they recommend, and which truly need escalation.

• Coach judgment instead of collecting approvals.

You are slowing down the organization if every decision still has to travel upward, even if this makes you feel more informed.

Days 45 to 75: Build evidence rather than certainty

There’s a danger in searching for the single right answer. Leaders are often rewarded for certainty, but markets do not usually offer certainty. They offer signals, tradeoffs, and imperfect information.

Decision velocity is not about making uninformed choices. It is about generating enough evidence to move. That means asking better questions:

• Do customers want this?

• Should we pursue this now?

• Can we actually deliver it?

• What is the smallest test that would teach us something meaningful?

The organizations that move fastest are not the ones that magically know. They are the ones that make calculated bets, testing earlier.

As a new leader, look for places where risk has been pushed too far downstream. Too often, companies spend months building alignment around an idea without testing the assumptions underneath it. They save the hardest learning for the most expensive moment. A better pattern is to scale learning before you scale commitment.

The goal is not to avoid mistakes. The goal is to make mistakes early enough, and small enough, that they teach instead of damage.

Days 60 to 90: Install rhythms that make speed a repeatable behavior

The best CEOs do not rely on heroic effort, they create operating rhythms that turn strategy into execution. Weekly, monthly, and quarterly routines become the mechanism for accountability, course correction, and resource allocation. Decision-making speeds up because the system supports it.

Leaders often miss this moment, they communicate priorities once, then assume the organization will stay aligned. It will not.

Decision velocity improves when teams know who owns what, when decisions will be reviewed, what metrics matter, how issues get escalated, and when priorities will be re-evaluated.

Ruthless focus matters. The best leaders are not simply adding new initiatives. They are actively deciding what to stop. Simple practices like stop/start/continue thinking and visible priority management keep the organization from drifting into noise. Stopping something is as important a decision as what to start.

Your first 90 days, creating the conditions for better, faster decisions

Begin with strategic clarity.
Grow with clear decision rights.
Accelerates with small tests and real evidence.
Build resilience through an operating rhythm.
Scale through intent based leadership.

So as a leader in your first 90 days, do not just ask, “What is happening here?”

Ask, “What is making it hard for this organization to decide?”