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Reclaiming Your Power: The Zombie Decisions Must Die
Week 2 of Powerful February. Deciding to not decide is also a decision
Jen Phillips
February 10, 2026
Hi it's Jen,
Years ago, I was on a market intelligence team running analysis on sales performance data. We were slicing. We were dicing. It was the kind of project that's supposed to surface clean insights about where the business was bleeding, why, and what we should do about it.
We found something nobody expected.
"No Decision" was the most common loss reason in the dataset. It was also the least accurate.
When we layered in qualitative detail, most "No Decision" losses didn't mean the prospect decided not to decide. It meant the seller didn't know what happened. So when it was time to log a loss reason, they picked the closest available value.
"No Decision" was the data's way of saying, “I don't know enough to decide what happened”.
You can’t get better at something you've mislabeled. You can't iterate on a pattern you never named. Every real loss has a lesson. Lost on price? Tighten your qualification. Lost to a competitor? Study the gap. Lost because your champion left mid-cycle? Build multi-threading into every deal from now on.
But a rogue "No Decision" gives you nothing to work with. No signal. No iteration. No path to doing better next time.
If this sounds familiar, your business may have its own version of 'No Decision' running rampant.
In today's issue:
Why zombie decisions eat both brains and margins
The three classifications for every open decision
A 15-minute sweep to get zombie decisions out of your organization
Read time: 6 minutes
Default
After more than 20 years in leadership, my hot take: Most execution problems aren't people problems. They aren't even strategy problems.
They're mislabeled and unresolved decision problems. And they're compounding on your balance sheet every week.
A zombie decision isn't a bad decision.
It’s one that's neither officially alive or dead, so it exists in a permanent state of maybe — eating mental energy and calendar time into perpetuity.
You know exactly which ones I'm talking about. The question that gets a few minutes at every leadership meeting without being resolved. The strategic call that's been "circling back" for two quarters. The issue everyone agrees needs to be addressed but somehow still isn’t.
West Monroe's 2026 'Speed Wins' research found that slow decision-making costs organizations up to 5% of annual revenue. It’s a revenue leak they dubbed the "Slowness Tax." They cited that leadership behavior is the biggest contributor to the Slowness Tax.
Zombie decisions eat both brains and margins.
When you ask them (and I do), leaders tell you they believe they already know their decision. The data exists. The instinct is there.
What keeps decisions open - undead but not fully alive - isn't complexity of deciding.
It's the absence of a system to finally disposition the zombies.
Ambition
When you reclaim your power of decision, you start by making absolutely sure every open decision is sorted to one of three states.
Decided. Full Stop.
It has an owner, an outcome, and a date it landed. Done.
Intentionally parked = No Decision Now.
This one matters. Sometimes not deciding is exactly the right call — especially for high-stakes, hard-to-reverse decisions where waiting genuinely reduces risk. Think: time-bound market or regulatory uncertainty.
But "not yet" is only a real decision when it's on purpose. And when the issue has an empowered owner. And a rationale. And a date it’ll get revisited.
In that case, you park the decision, with complete clarity on why it’s parked, and when you’ll come back to it.
Dead Decisions = No Decision Needed. Ever.
 | Open decisions that are both low upside AND easily reversible may not be worth the organizational oxygen they’ve been consuming. |
The Lumbering Zombie
It’s the (dreaded and dreadful) fourth and completely destructive decision state — the plodding, shuffling decisions nobody decided, parked, or killed.
 No one wants this. | These aren’t decisions the business is CHOOSING to keep open. |
Sparking nightmares until they’re sorted.
The new ambition isn’t completely eradicating all open decisions.
It’s radically reducing Zombie Decisions.
Not deciding by default is an expensive lack of alignment dressed up as patience.
Be a zombie-killer: Know a founder or leader whose meetings are full of decisions that never land?
GO | DO
Estimated time: 45 - 60 minutes | Estimated energy: minimal
This week, let’s tackle some zombies.
 | Be the Lookout (15 minutes)Review the last 4 leadership meetings. Find all the issues that made the agenda more than once without closure or meaningful action. For each, ask two questions:
Anything Low Stakes + Easily Reversible: kill it (or close it) today. Not next week. A decision this small doesn't deserve another meeting. Make the call, communicate it, move on. |
 | Name The State (15 minutes)For every decision spotted in your lookout, define a state before you close the doc:
Decisions made with conviction are always better than keeping options open, waiting for perfect data. |
 | Zombie Reduction Protocol (15-30 minutes)Review and revise in your next leadership meeting. Confirm owners, outcomes, and blocks preventing progress that require support; expected business impact; ease of reversal/iteration; and time horizons. Adjust as needed. Then communicate the decisions and move forward with conviction. |
What’s In It For All Of Us
Every zombie decision you handle is a meaningful act of organizational repair.
→ Frees the capacity of someone who was quietly carrying it.
→ Unblocks the downstream decisions that were stuck because of it.
→ Signals — clearly, and to everyone — that this is a business where things can and do move forward efficiently.
Use your power to move the open decisions that matter. Park the ones that aren't ready — on purpose. Kill the ones that were never worth the meeting.
And stop letting your margins and your mental energy get eaten by things that are neither alive nor dead.
🧟♀️ That's the version of leadership that changes how work actually works.
Get In There
📊 Subscribe to The New Ambition for instant access to the complete subscriber vault: healthy leadership tools, templates, and frameworks updated weekly with resources shaped by subscriber feedback.
📝 You're Winning. So Why Is It So Exhausting? If this topic landed, read edition one in the Reclaiming Your Power series. It's the foundation everything else builds on.
🍿 How to make good decisions [250K views]. A Fin and a Swede make learning more about confident decision-making fun. A TEDx talk that’s aged well and is well worth a listen.
Was this edition helpful? |
Your turn: What's one Zombie Decision that keeps stumbling into every meeting and just never gets traction?
Work with me
If your organization has a small or large Zombie Decision infestation that's eating time and margin every week, it’s not a people problem. It's not a discipline problem.
It's a systems problem that deserves traction. And that's exactly the kind of problem I exist to solve. Let's talk.
P.S. Next week’s edition explores the Power of Priority: What happens when everything is "critical" and your team is drowning.