TL;DR
Your team isn’t indecisive. Your incentives and narratives are misaligned.
“Zombie Decisions” reappear because the safest move is to stall—not execute.
Run three checks—incentive, interpretation, safety—before reopening any stalled decision.
We’ve all sat through the "Zombie Meeting."
You gather the leadership team to make a strategic call. You debate. You clarify. You reach alignment. The recap email goes out.
Two weeks later, the decision reappears—quietly revived in Slack DMs, hallway conversations, or the “meeting after the meeting.” No one says the decision is wrong. They simply behave as if the decision never happened.
This is decision latency: the hidden drag where stalled choices tax momentum, burn time, frustrate top performers, and quietly bleed profit. Most leaders respond by demanding discipline or stronger communication. But stalled decisions rarely signal weak leadership.
They signal broken narrative infrastructure.
Your people aren’t hesitating. They are following the logic your system rewards.
The physics of the problem
Decisions sit at the end of a chain:
Perception → Incentives → Behavior → Decisions
Most teams only manage the last link. They tweak meeting structure, require tighter decks, or push for “clearer ownership.” None of that fixes the upstream conditions that actually determine whether a decision holds.
If Perception—the governing narrative about how the company creates value—is fragmented, Incentives will fragment with it. When incentives fragment, execution collapses into relitigation.
A precise example
The Decision: “We are prioritizing speed and innovation.”
The Narrative Reality: Finance defines success as “zero variance from budget.”
The Outcome: Anyone who moves fast or takes risk is penalized at the scorecard level.
The decision dies not because the team disagrees—but because the structure makes agreement unsafe.
This is narrative drift: When leaders leave the room, they revert to the legacy narratives that determine their actual performance environment.
The diagnosis: narrative drift
Narrative drift occurs when:
Teams verbally support the decision
Functional narratives contradict it
Scorecards reinforce the old logic
The safest individual path is to wait out the decision
Different silos optimize for different “truths”:
Sales → volume
Product → stability
Legal → protection
Finance → predictability
No one is wrong; they are following their inherited value system.
Until you realign the narrative that defines “good,” teams will keep relitigating decisions that were already settled.
Stop debating. Start diagnosing.
When a decision resurfaces, do not revisit the arguments.
The correct question isn’t “Do we agree?”
It’s “What prevents this from being safe, rewarded, or legible to execute?”
Run this three-part diagnostic.
1. The incentive check
Question: “Does this decision require anyone here to act against their current scorecard or bonus structure?”
You’re looking for incentive fragmentation.
If collaboration is asked for but bonuses reward individual wins, collaboration won’t happen. If innovation is asked for but cost control is rewarded, innovation will die in budgeting.
Incentives beat alignment. Every time.
2. The interpretation check
Question: “If we execute this, what ‘old truth’ about our company does it violate?”
You’re looking for legacy mental models.
Example: A company built on “white-glove service” decides to automate support. Senior leaders will resist—not because automation is wrong, but because it contradicts a story that once made them successful.
You don’t need better messaging. You need a new interpretation of what the company is becoming.
3. The safety check
Question: “What is the safest individual path right now—executing this decision or doing nothing?”
You’re uncovering the permission structure. If the stated value is “We embrace smart risk,” but the last three people who failed were reassigned or exited, the true permission signal is: Avoid visible risk.
Actions follow the real safety signal, not the aspirational one.
Case study. The risk-aversion trap
Three years ago I worked with a large health and fitness brand out of the Midwest that was convinced their execution problems were “communication gaps.” They planned more MT (management team) and LT (leadership team) meetings and a town hall.
A diagnostic revealed the real issue: A budget-dominant finance narrative controlled the execution path. Bold initiatives died at the same gate every cycle—the budgeting review—because the legacy narrative defined risk as irresponsible and cost containment as virtuous.
We didn’t fix communication. We re-architected the narrative so that operational leverage—not austerity—became the new definition of safety and stewardship. Once the narrative and incentives aligned, decisions held. Relitigation evaporated.
Takeaway
You cannot manage your way out of narrative drift. You must architect your way out.
Narrative is the operating system that governs decisions. When the OS is misaligned, every decision meeting becomes a bug report.
When a choice stalls:
Pause the debate.
Examine incentives, interpretations, and safety signals.
Name the conflicting narrative that makes execution unsafe.
Rewrite the narrative so the decision becomes the obvious, rewarded path.
Most teams don’t have a decision problem; they have a narrative problem masquerading as one.
Next week
Now that we’ve stopped relitigating, how do we see the whole board?
Next issue: how to map the narrative environment so hidden constraints never reach your agenda.
Narrative Alchemy is written by Ronell Smith, a narrative strategist who has spent 25 years helping organizations build the infrastructure that clarity requires. Subscribe to get each issue delivered to your inbox.