Your Biggest Risk Isn’t a Wrong Decision: it’s the One You Never Made!
Decision-makers are often afraid of making the wrong call. But in reality, the biggest threat are the decisions that weren't made at all. These are the risks that never appeared on a dashboard, never got communicated in a meeting, and were never recognized until it was too late. You need a mechanism to expose these hidden gaps - before they turn into costly failures.
The Disaster No One Saw Coming
A leading financial services company had a world-class compliance system, monitored 24/7. Every performance metric was green. Every process was running flawlessly. Yet, they got into the news for a major compliance breach.
How? As part of a large modernization initiative, a small legacy batch process generating synchronization reports got decommissioned together with the server that hosted it. The related KPIs had also been removed during the sunset. The remediation system which processed the input continued operating flawlessly. By the time leadership became aware of the missing files, the company had already violated regulations for months.
The Hidden Failure Pattern
This wasn’t a failure of execution. It was a failure of recognition. The decision to retire the old process was made with good intent - but without visibility into its downstream impact. And since every monitored KPI was clean, no one questioned it.
The Real Problem: Critical Decisions Get Lost
Executives face an overwhelming number of decisions daily. But the ones that cause the most damage aren’t the ones they make incorrectly - it's those they never even realized were important.
Why does this happen? Because critical decisions often get filtered out, misinterpreted, or delayed in process. The more decisions, the harder it becomes to discern signal from noise.
Why Decisions Get Lost
The Decision STRIP Method is a simple, powerful tool to identify the causes of decision gaps:
- S – It Was Said, But You Didn’t Get It: The message was unclear, lacked urgency, or wasn’t presented in a way that captured your attention.
- T – It Was Thwarted Before It Reached You: A gatekeeper filtered it out, or it was deprioritized before reaching your level.
- R – It Was Removed From Your Radar: Other priorities took over, and this issue never made it into decision discussions.
- I – It Was Invisible Because No One Took Ownership: The issue sat in a gray area - everyone assumed someone else was responsible.
- P – You Postponed It Because You Didn’t Have Time: It wasn’t urgent enough at that moment, so it was pushed aside: Until it turned into a crisis.
Making the Right Decisions
Many leaders struggle with incessant firefighting - never realizing that this happens because the most important decision isn’t the one you got wrong, it’s the one you never even knew to make.
The winning move isn't adding further complexity to decision making - it's illuminating the blind spots. You need a systematic approach to ensures that you aren’t just making decisions, but making the right ones.
How VXS Decision Addresses This Blind Spot
VXS Decision doesn’t just track execution - it tracks decision failures. It identifies where decisions aren’t being made at all, ensuring that the right issues reach the right people in time.
Traditional monitoring tools only track what has already been measured. But VXS Decision goes further - it detects missing execution, surfacing gaps before they become crises.
What VXS Decision Does to Solve the Problem
VXS Decision eliminates the risk of missing decisions by ensuring that nothing critical is overlooked. It systematically enables members of your company to communicate key issues in a way that drives action.
Whereas most other systems will just alert you when a KPI drifts out of range and leave you stuck with the question whether or where it matters, VXS Decision alerts you when critical information needs to be factored into decisions.
How VXS Decision Helps Solve Your Decision Problems
Why: Your biggest risk isn’t in a wrong decision - it’s in the one you never made! VXS Decision ensures you focus on the decisions that matter.
How: VXS Decision makes execution gaps visible, aligns priorities, and reveals hidden risks before they turn into failures.
What: VXS Decision offers Clarity, Control, and Confidence in the decisions that define your success.
Stop operating in the dark. VXS Decision ensures the decisions that matter don’t get lost.