Andrew Chen recently published a piece on unconventional business metrics that caught my attention. Among his examples - "Lies per Second" and "PowerPoints per Launch" -one metric stood out as particularly relevant to enterprise leaders: the Meetings per Decision Ratio.
Chen describes the problem perfectly:
"Why does it take so many meetings to make a decision? Sometimes there's no owner to the decision so it's unclear who has the authority to even give the greenlight. Sometimes it's an ill-defined goal or process. Sometimes it's constantly changing."
He's right. But here's what he didn't say: this isn't just an efficiency problem. It's a governance crisis hiding in plain sight.
The Hidden Cost of Decision Dysfunction
When your Meetings per Decision Ratio (MPDR) climbs, you're not just wasting calendar time. You're creating organizational risk. Every meeting without resolution is another opportunity for:
Accountability gaps. When decisions finally get made after seven meetings instead of two, who actually owns the outcome? The original proposer? The loudest voice in meeting four? The executive who finally broke the tie? Without documentation, no one knows - and when things go wrong, everyone points fingers.
Reasoning decay. By the time you reach consensus, does anyone remember why you chose Option B over Option A? The context that made it seem obvious in week one has evaporated. When the board asks "what were you thinking?" six months later, you're reconstructing from memory.
Audit exposure. Regulators and auditors don't care how many meetings you held. They care whether you can demonstrate that appropriate factors were considered, risks were weighed, and the decision process was sound. A high MPDR almost guarantees you can't.
The Decision-to-Rumination Problem
Chen also introduces what he calls the "Decision to Rumination Ratio" - the observation that people often spend months researching a car purchase but make career-changing decisions on a whim. The correlation between time spent and decision importance is essentially random.
Organizations do the same thing. I've watched leadership teams agonize for quarters over office furniture while approving million-dollar technology investments in a single meeting because "we trust the vendor." The rigor applied to decisions bears no relationship to their actual stakes.
This is where traditional decision-making advice fails. Telling people to "think more carefully about important decisions" doesn't work because in the moment, every decision feels appropriately weighted. You need a system that forces proportional rigor regardless of how the decision feels.
Time to First Excuse: The Accountability Test
Chen's "Time to First Excuse" (TFE) metric measures how quickly poor results get blamed on external factors. Low TFE - excuses appearing immediately - signals a team that needs intervention.
But here's the governance angle: excuses thrive in documentation vacuums. When there's no record of what was considered, what was rejected, and why the chosen path seemed best given available information, every outcome becomes defensible through revisionist history. "We couldn't have known" becomes the universal shield.
Audit-defensible documentation eliminates this. When your HELPMIR analysis (Chen) or Decision Assistant Brief™ (TEAM Solutions) is on record - showing you explicitly considered Human factors, Economic conditions, Legal exposure, Political context, Media implications, Infrastructure dependencies, and Reputational risk - you can't retroactively claim ignorance. You either considered the factor or you didn't. The record shows which.
This isn't about creating gotcha documentation that punishes decision-makers. It's about creating the kind of transparency that actually improves decisions in the first place. When you know your reasoning will be documented, you reason more carefully.
The Maturity Gap in Decision Documentation
Chen notes that as startups mature, their presentations should shift from narrative to numbers - what he calls the "Numbers vs Text Ratio." Early-stage companies tell stories. Series B companies show metrics. When a mature company still leads with narrative, investors get nervous.
The same principle applies to decision governance. Early-stage companies make decisions around a whiteboard and move on. That's appropriate - speed matters more than documentation when you're figuring out product-market fit.
But somewhere between startup and enterprise, organizations need to develop decision maturity. The board expects it. Regulators expect it. Auditors expect it. And increasingly, AI-assisted decision-making demands it.
Here's the problem: most organizations never make this transition intentionally. They bolt on approval workflows and compliance checkboxes without addressing the fundamental question of decision documentation. The result is bureaucracy without governance - lots of process, no defensibility.
What Audit-Defensible Actually Means
When I talk about audit-defensible decision documentation, I'm not talking just about CYA paperwork. I'm talking about documentation that could survive scrutiny from:
The board, asking why this strategic direction was chosen over alternatives.
Regulators, examining whether appropriate risk factors were considered.
Legal counsel, defending the organization's decision process in litigation.
Future leadership, trying to understand the context behind decisions they inherited.
Your future self, six months from now when the decision's consequences have materialized and you need to understand what you were thinking.
This kind of documentation requires more than meeting notes. It requires structured capture of the decision context, the options considered, the evaluation criteria applied, the risks identified, and the reasoning that led to the final choice. It requires transparency about what information was available, what information was missing, and what assumptions bridged the gap.
Fixing Your Decision Metrics
Chen suggests that someday AI note-taking apps will automatically track metrics like Meetings per Decision Ratio and alert us when Lies per Second exceeds acceptable thresholds. He's being somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but he's also not wrong about the direction.
The organizations that will thrive in an AI-assisted future aren't the ones using AI to make decisions faster. They're the ones using AI to make decisions more defensibly - with documentation that demonstrates appropriate governance regardless of whether the outcome was favorable.
This means building systems that capture not just what was decided, but how it was decided. Systems that apply consistent frameworks across decisions of similar stakes. Systems that create the audit trail your board expects before they start asking for it.
Your Meetings per Decision Ratio matters. But what matters more is whether those meetings produce documentation that would survive scrutiny - or just calendar invites and memory.
Mike McKenna is the founder of TEAM Solutions and creator of the Intelligent Decision System (IDS), an enterprise governance solution that produces audit-defensible decision documentation. His background includes crisis leadership during disasters like Katrina and Ike, and training over 10,000 professionals in incident management and decision-making frameworks.