2.7×
Faster EBITDA growth at the companies whose processes are rated best for judgment
Bain & Company, 2026
Stop gambling with decision quality
Decision-to-Execution Maturity Model
At its core, an organization is a decision system: , information flows, incentives and that turn strategy into results. Dem² measures how well that system is built at each tier and how well it performs in the decisions you actually make, and points your interventions (changes to one or more components) at the parts most likely to make good decisions less dependent on chance or on key people having their best day.
Common problems in organizational decision systems
“Things are not moving fast enough.”
In one Gartner survey of 407 marketing and other leaders, organizations with high “collaboration drag” (too many meetings, too much feedback and unclear decision-making authority) were 37% less likely to achieve their revenue goals (Gartner, 2024).
“Why does it take a week to get a straight answer?”
Executives and teams alike spend a quarter of the workweek searching for information (Atlassian, 2025).
“Why am I always the last to hear the bad news?”
Where raising bad news feels risky, it tends to arrive late. In DDI’s leadership survey, leaders’ trust in their immediate manager fell from 46% to 29% between 2022 and 2024 (DDI, 2025).
“We agreed on the priorities. Why is everyone working on something else?”
In one survey of 7,600 managers in 262 companies, only 55% of middle managers could name even one of their company’s top five priorities (Sull, Homkes and Sull, 2015).
Replacing people rarely fixes this. If are unclear, warnings travel by accident, incentives point the wrong way and no one studies the last miss, the next team is likely to inherit the same failure. Dem² measures the organizational decision system so you can fix what produces the failure, not the nearest person.
What poor decision-making costs
Nearly 6 pts
higher average total shareholder returns for companies in the top fifth on decision effectiveness (how well a company makes and executes its decisions)
Bain & Company survey of nearly 800 companies, 2010
61%
of respondents say most of their decision-making time is used ineffectively
McKinsey, 2019
530,000+
More than 530,000 days of managers’ working time a year could be lost at an average Fortune 500 company
McKinsey thought experiment, 2019
Why similar companies end up in different places
Put two companies in the same market, with the same technology and the same capital, and one will often pull well ahead of the other. Part of the reason lies in how each of them decides. A strategy is a bet until it turns into committed decisions about what gets funded, who gets hired and what gets dropped. Carrying it out takes many more, made across the organization by people working out what the strategy means for their part of the business, usually with less information than they would like.
Dem² is built on the view that how reliably that chain of decisions works, from the executive team to the people serving customers, explains much of the gap between the two companies, which is why Dem² holds that organizations compete on decision reliability under uncertainty. In our view, that reliability is set by , information flows, incentives and , and leaders can change each of them. Who in your organization is responsible for how well it decides?
Where to start
Free · self-serve survey
Decision Reliability Check
Rate how the twelve components of your organizational decision system look from your seat. Get the report by email, then invite colleagues and see where you disagree about the same organization.
Free · 30 minutes
The 30-minute conversation
Take the Check first. Lukas Klose then walks through your results with you: where they suggest your organizational decision system is strong, where it is exposed, and which questions your board should be asking. You receive the brief afterwards.
Paid · diagnosis
Dem² Assessment
From the executive team to the front line, grounded in real recent decisions: where breaks down, where different tiers see a different company, and what to fix first.
See where your decisions break before the quarter does.
Start with your own view. The Decision Reliability Check is free, and individual answers are never shared. If it exposes a weak point, invite colleagues and see whether they are looking at the same company you are.
How we handle your answers: privacy.