Decision-to-Execution Maturity Model
Stop gambling. Make decision quality predictable.
At its core, every organization is a decision system: decision rights, information flows, incentives and learning loops that turn strategy into results. Dem² measures how well your organization performs at each level, and then informs your interventions so that decision quality becomes intrinsic, instead of being a product of chance or of key people having their best day.
Common Decision System Problems
Three people are not a decision system
When the right people are in the room, the calls are sharp. When one of them is on a plane, promoted or gone, the company waits, escalates or guesses. That is key-person risk built into your strategy.
The process that drives your numbers runs blind
You track revenue, cost, risk and talent to the decimal. How your organization decides, the process behind all four, goes unmeasured, and you learn a decision was bad when the quarter tells you.
Bad news dies in hand-offs
The engineer sees the defect, the account manager hears the complaint, the analyst flags the risk. At GM, the ignition-switch fault was known inside the company for about a decade before the recall. Whether a warning reaches someone who can act, in time, depends on hand-offs nobody designed.
Slow decisions are a hidden tax
Every decision that waits, loops back for rework or collects one more approval burns senior time and lets a window close. The bill hides in overhead and missed opportunities. No report names it, so nobody owns it.
Replacing people rarely fixes this. If authority is unclear, warnings travel by accident, incentives point the wrong way and nobody studies the last miss, the next team inherits the same failure. Dem² measures the decision system so you can fix the cause, not the nearest person.
Decision drag is expensive.
6 pts
higher shareholder returns for companies in the top fifth on decision effectiveness
Bain & Company, nearly 800 companies
61%
of respondents say most of their decision-making time is used ineffectively
McKinsey, 2019
530,000
days of managers’ time lost a year at an average Fortune 500 company
McKinsey estimate, 2019
Decision reliability is an operating advantage. In many companies, nobody owns it.
Organizations compete on decision reliability under uncertainty. Put two companies in the same market with the same technology and the same capital, and they still end up in different places. A large part of the difference is how reliably each one decides and turns its decisions into action. The levers are concrete: decision rights, information flows, incentives and learning loops. If you do not manage that system, it manages you.
Where to start
Free · self-serve survey
Decision Reliability Check
Rate your organization on the twelve components that drive decision quality. Get a preliminary report by email, then invite colleagues and see where you disagree about the same organization.
Free · 30 minutes
Overview Assessment
Stress-test your decision system with Lukas Klose: where your organization is likely strong, where it is exposed, and which questions your board should be asking. You receive a short written brief afterwards.
Paid · full diagnosis
Dem² Assessment
Across every level and grounded in real recent decisions: where intent breaks down, where the levels 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.