Organizations often associate rigour with doing more analysis. More interviews. More reviews. More stakeholders. More approvals. More checkpoints. More discussion before a decision is made. Sometimes that additional scrutiny is exactly what is needed. But rigour has another dimension that receives less attention: where in the decision process it occurs. An organization can be extraordinarily careful and still manage risk poorly if most of its scrutiny is applied downstream of

Organizations make decisions in the present. But those decisions rarely remain there. A decision that solves an immediate problem may create a constraint several months from now. An investment that creates pressure today may build capability that matters years later. A temporary workaround may be exactly what the situation requires, while becoming increasingly problematic if it quietly becomes permanent. This is one of the difficulties of organizational decision-making. We ha