91探花

At seven in the morning, before I have even made my first coffee, there may already be three decisions waiting for me. Each one could affect how much someone on the other side of the world earns that day.

Ten years ago, decisions of this scale might have travelled through several layers of headquarters and taken weeks. Today, they need to be made within a day.

Consider two familiar situations.

A distributed marketplace wants to launch an experiment, but the discussion has already lasted three weeks. Some stakeholders support it, others have concerns, and everyone continues to contribute but nobody makes the final call.

Elsewhere, headquarters spends months developing a global initiative. Meanwhile, a local team has already built its own version under a different name and budget. When the overlap emerges, nobody can explain who originally owned the problem.

These are symptoms of the same organisational condition. And it cannot be fixed by hiring more senior people, introducing another coaching programme, or rolling out a new OKR system.

It took me time to understand that. I deal with this complexity every day, and one lesson has stayed with me: the problem is rarely the people. It is the system in which they are expected to operate.

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Why Speed Has Become A Condition For Survival

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Speed is not a quality of individual people. It is a property of the operating model.

As a business expands across markets, products, and customer segments, dependencies multiply. More teams become involved, responsibilities overlap, and even straightforward decisions get stuck between functions and levels.

Hiring stronger people does not solve a structural problem. Exceptional people working within an unclear system will still make slow decisions, duplicate work, and compete for ownership.

Uncertainty makes this more urgent. Currency movements and regulatory changes can reshape a market within days. Competitors change local rules with every launch. AI is redefining how organisations operate so quickly that a decision made in January may already be outdated by June.

In this environment, the most powerful lever an organisation can control is its decision-making model: who makes which decisions, at what level, and how quickly the organization can act.

If this model is not designed deliberately, it will emerge on its own, usually through committees, endless cycles of approvals, and endless Slack threads. Speed was once a competitive advantage. Today, it is a condition for survival.

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The Three Levels Of Decision-Making

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Complete centralisation is too slow, while full local autonomy creates duplication and inconsistency. The main challenge is deciding what must remain centralised and what should move closer to the market.

In my experience, a mature distributed operating model has three levels. Global core owns the decisions that define the organisation: strategy, capital allocation, brand principles, technology platforms, safety and security standards, ethics, and the hiring bar.

Regional hubs translate global principles into regional reality. They allocate resources across groups of markets, identify common patterns and scale successful approaches from one market to similar ones.

Local edge owns decisions that require immediate market knowledge: local supply and demand, operational tactics, competitor response, campaigns, and pricing within agreed boundaries.

The closer a decision is to the customer, the greater the role of local expertise should be. The exact distribution across these levels matters less than whether it is explicit and understood consistently.

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Three Principles That Make The Model Work

Trust Local Expertise Without Losing The Global View

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Local teams are often the first to notice changes in customer behaviour, competitor activity, or operational conditions. They should be able to test ideas based on what they see.

But one local example should not automatically become a global policy. A strong distributed organisation allows markets to test, learns from the results, looks for patterns, and then decides what should be scaled. Local teams provide depth; the centre provides perspective.

Accept That Data Will Always Be Incomplete

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Data should inform decisions, but the complete picture will never arrive. External conditions change, reporting reflects the past, and some information cannot be captured.

Waiting for certainty is not a neutral choice. A decision made too late can be as costly as a decision that turns out to be wrong. The goal is to use consistent metrics, look at trends rather than isolated data points, and distinguish between reversible and irreversible decisions.

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Make Decision Rights Explicit

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Many complaints about organisational slowness come down to one basic problem: nobody knows who has the final say.

A simple structure can resolve much of this:

• One accountable person makes the decision
• One informed person receives the outcome
• No more than two consulted people provide input

A meeting is also not a decision. Every decision-making meeting should end with one sentence stating what was decided, who owns the next step, and when it is due. If that sentence cannot be written, the meeting produced a conversation, not a decision.

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Five Practices To Start On Monday

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1. Create a one-page decision map. List the ten decisions your team needs to make. Name one accountable person for each and allow no more than two consulted people. If you cannot identify the accountable, the problem is the operating model.
2. Record decisions in writing. After every meeting, write one sentence: what was decided, who owns it, and when it is due.
3. Apply the rule of five. One unusual signal may be noise. If the same pattern appears in five different places, it deserves investigation.
4. Review how leaders spend their time. Operational teams may spend most of their time on execution. Leaders should spend most of theirs on the horizon and the system. When leaders personally resolve every daily problem, the organisation becomes dependent on them.
5. Create a shared language around a few metrics. Five to seven consistent metrics are more useful than dozens of disconnected ones. If a team cannot name its most important metrics from memory, its members may be optimising for different outcomes without realising it.

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A Simple Diagnostic For Every Operating Model

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Take five decisions your team made during the past two weeks and ask:

1. Who was accountable?
2. Where was the decision documented?
3. Was there a clear owner and deadline?

If the answer to several of these questions is 鈥淚 don鈥檛 know,鈥� the operating model needs attention. No senior hire, coaching programme or new goal-setting framework will solve that problem on its own.

Ultimately, every distributed organisation depends on three things:

• How quickly it understands what is happening
• How quickly it makes decisions
• How clearly it knows who has the authority to decide

Speed does not come from asking people to work faster. It comes from building a system in which capable people know when to act, what they own, and which decisions do not require another round of approval.

Speed is not a property of the people. It is a property of the system.

Evgenia Matrosova is a Chief Ride-Hailing Officer at InDrive, running teams across 48 markets at once. The views here reflect personal operating experience, not the position of any single organisation.