Manifesto

The Decided Organization

You know the feeling before you can name it.

You’re in the stadium. The team you grew up with is on the field. The same field, the same green, the same angles you memorized as a kid. Everything looks right.

But something is off. The crowd feels like an audience. The beer costs what a meal should. The seat next to you is empty — bought by someone who isn’t coming, held by a platform, priced for a market. The family behind you is doing the maths on parking fees.

Nobody did this to you deliberately. There was no meeting where someone decided to ruin your experience. Instead, there were a hundred meetings & initiatives where someone decided something else — yield optimisation, dynamic pricing, experience tiers, partner integrations — and those moments accumulated to eventually produce your most recent experience.

You didn’t lose your team in one moment. You lost your energy for it through others’ decisions.

The pattern has a name

In 2023, Cory Doctorow named it: enshitification. The cycle by which platforms — and increasingly, any customer-facing business — degrade predictably over time.

First, the business works hard to serve its customers. Then it captures them. Then it pivots to extracting value from them in service of shareholders. Then it dies — slowly enough that the people running it rarely see it coming.

The insight that makes this useful isn’t the word. It’s the mechanism. Enshittification isn’t what happens when companies stop caring. It’s what happens when the incentive architecture — the metrics, the targets, the quarterly pressures, the things that get people promoted — quietly disconnects from the thing the company was built to do.

Nobody decides to betray their customers. They decide to hit their number. They decide to optimise the funnel. They decide to reduce cost-to-serve. Each decision is rational. Each decision is defensible. Each decision makes sense where and when it’s made.

And too often each decision moves the dial, slightly, toward extraction.

This is not a values problem. It’s an architecture problem.

When it goes right: an inside look

Take citizenM, the funky quirky hotel company. When they launched, they made a series of decisions that looked commercially insane.

No restaurant. No room service. No concierge. No loyalty programme. Rooms so small that a traditional hotelier would have called them uninhabitable. A check-in kiosk instead of a front desk.

Every one of those decisions was a subtraction. And every one of them was deliberate — not cost-cutting dressed up as philosophy, but a genuine answer to a genuine question: what does our guest actually need, and what are we adding just because the industry expects it?

The result was a product with almost no gap between intent and delivery. Because they had decided, explicitly, what they were and weren’t. There was no room for the incremental compromises that erode most hospitality brands — because the compromises had already been made, consciously, at the beginning.

Most companies never have that conversation. They accumulate instead. They add the loyalty programme because the competitor has one. They add the restaurant because the owner wants one. They add the upsell because the revenue team needs one (to meet their targets). And slowly, the product becomes a reflection of internal politics rather than customer intent.

citizenM didn’t succeed because they were more innovative. They succeeded because they were more decided.

How clarity erodes

Here is the more uncomfortable truth: even companies that start decided don’t stay that way.

Leadership changes. Market conditions shift. A new CFO arrives with different assumptions about what the business is optimizing for. A pressure emerges — competitive, financial, regulatory — that reweighs the room without anyone explicitly agreeing to reweigh it.

The first principles don’t disappear. They just stop being the thing the room checks against.

And once that happens, decisions become negotiations. Every strategic choice becomes a tug of war between competing priorities that should never have been competing in the first place. The same debates resurface every cycle. The same questions get re-litigated every time there’s a new leader or a new budget. Not because the people are wrong. Because the foundation the decisions should rest on was never made explicit — or was, once, and then quietly forgotten.

This is how good organizations start making decisions that contradict themselves.

First principles in practice

First principles thinking is not a new idea. Aristotle described it as reasoning from the most basic truths — the things you know independently of convention, analogy, or what the competitor is doing.

In an organization, it means answering — before anything else, before strategy, before structure — the questions that make every subsequent decision obvious.

Not what do our customers want? That’s market research. Not what do our customers expect? That’s benchmarking. But what do they deserve from us?— that’s a values question. It requires a genuine answer. And it requires everyone in the leadership team to agree on the same one.

When that agreement exists, something changes. Decisions stop being negotiations. They become checks. You’re not choosing between options — you’re verifying against something you already settled.

The organizations that never debate the same decision twice aren’t smarter or better resourced. They just did this work. Most haven’t.

Augusta National as proof

Every April, Augusta National re-makes decisions that look counterintuitive from the outside and are, I suspect, completely obvious from the inside.

A $1.50 sandwich unchanged for decades. A no-phone policy that looks nostalgic and which might be the most deliberate attention design decision in sport. A ceramic gnome — their hottest merchandise, reselling at twenty times retail price — discontinued because the queue to buy it was incompatible with the experience they promised. Free parking!

Each of these decisions is commercially questionable on the surface. Each was made without committee, without debate, without a consultant’s report.

Because in 1931, a small group of people answered one question — what does our patron deserve?— and everything since has just been checking against that answer.

But here’s what most people miss about Augusta: they are not a traditionalist organization. They are a radical innovator who chose to make the innovation invisible.

First golf tournament on nationwide radio, 1934. First to push for television, 1956. First HD broadcast in golf. Score-to-par — the universal language of golf today — their invention. A course reshaped continuously, not to honor tradition, but to improve the experience. Innovation so deliberate it became invisible.

Augusta looks like a 2 on an innovation spectrum. It operates like a 9. And the gap between those two numbers — the decision to innovate invisibly, to hide the work completely — is itself a first principle.

Ninety years of decisions, all downstream of one vision and conversations that happened in a room, between people who genuinely agreed.

That is what the decided organization looks like.

The one conversation most leadership teams need

It doesn’t require months. It doesn’t require a transformation programme.

It requires one conversation. One room. The right people. Questions honest enough to produce answers everyone owns.

The questions aren’t complicated. They’re just rarely asked out loud, together, with the honesty required to produce answers nobody can walk back from. What are we actually optimizing for — and is that the same thing for everyone in this room? What would we refuse to do, even if it made financial sense? What have we already done that we shouldn’t have?

Most leadership teams have the answers. They just haven’t been in the same room, at the same time, with the same question.

That’s the gap. And it’s smaller than it looks.

If you recognize your organization in it, I’d be glad to talk.

Alex Lamotte-Hysbergue is the founder of The Decided Org, an advisory firm helping C-suite leadership teams close the gap between intent and decision. The Alignment Workshop is The Decided Org’s primary engagement.