Executive Summary
Decision gridlock rarely looks dramatic.
Calendars fill up. Decks get sharper. Teams stay “busy.”
Yet launches slow, teams hesitate, and the organisation starts to feel heavy.
Many mid-level managers recognise the pattern immediately because they live it every day: more inputs, more stakeholders, more revisions, fewer clear calls.
Evidence for the workload pressure is piling up. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index research notes that employees using Microsoft 365 are interrupted every two minutes by a meeting, email, or notification.
Asana’s research on meetings reports that unproductive meeting time has jumped sharply since 2019, with individual contributors wasting 3.7 hours per week and managers 5.8 hours per week in unproductive meetings in 2024.
Atlassian’s research adds another blunt signal: 78% of people surveyed say they’re expected to attend so many meetings it’s hard to get their work done.
CPG feels this acutely because the industry runs on interconnected decisions: portfolio, pack, pricing, claims, promotions, retailers, supply constraints, innovation timing, and consumer trust.
When decisions stall, growth stalls. Margin gets protected the blunt way, through cuts and discounts, rather than through smarter choices.
This article shows why gridlock is rising, why “more data” often makes things worse, and how mid-level leaders can restore momentum using a simple operating rhythm.
“Busy” is Not the Same as Moving Forward
Microsoft’s analysis of the modern workday includes a statistic that should make any leader wince: employees are interrupted every two minutes by a meeting, email, or notification.
That constant fragmentation creates a predictable organisational reflex. People compensate by working later, producing more documentation, and scheduling more meetings so nothing gets missed.
Asana’s findings on unproductive meetings reinforce the picture. Individual contributors spent an average of 3.7 hours per week in unproductive meetings in 2024, and managers spent 5.8 hours per week, with both figures rising sharply versus 2019.
Atlassian’s research adds the actual lived experience: 78% of people say meeting volume makes it hard to get work done, and 76% feel drained on meeting-heavy days.
Here’s the twist.
Those numbers don’t only describe “productivity.”
They describe why decisions are slowing down.
Have you noticed something similar in your own organisation?
When people are constantly interrupted, thinking quality drops.
When thinking quality drops, people seek safety. Safety looks like additional stakeholders, extra reviews, more research, more meetings, more decks, and another round of alignment “just to be sure.”
The real problem is not a lack of effort. Effort is everywhere. The problem is commitment. Motion has replaced momentum.
A useful question to ask any time a project feels stuck is brutally simple: “Are we learning, or are we hiding?”
Learning changes the next decision. Hiding delays it.
Momentum returns when teams trade more discussion for better decision hygiene.
Gridlock in CPG: Complexity with Consequences
CPG is not a single-decision business. Every call triggers downstream consequences.
One pack change affects claims, production, procurement, shelf fit, retailer content, and consumer trust.
One pricing move affects trade terms, promotions, competitor response, and household penetration.
One innovation choice affects supply readiness, marketing timing, and retailer confidence.
McKinsey’s work on CPG operations points to what radical simplification could look like when leaders decide to do it. Their report describes category leaders making bold portfolio calls, reducing SKU complexity by 80-90% in some cases.
This statistic is less about SKUs and more about the decision behind it. Simplification is rarely a systems problem first. It’s usually a decision problem first.
Public company language is moving in the same direction.
Unilever’s 2026 statement talks about becoming “simpler, sharper, and faster,” and describes disciplined execution as central to competitive performance.
Nestlé’s annual review describes the need to transmit data across the value chain so the company can react faster in decisions about procurement, manufacturing, and distribution.
Those are not marketing phrases. They reflect real pressure across big and mid-sized players alike: fewer distractions, faster decisions, cleaner execution.
Mid-level managers feel the pressure the most because they are asked to keep everything moving while also keeping everyone comfortable. That is where gridlock forms.
Nobody wants to be the person who made the wrong call, so everyone becomes the person who avoided making one.
A sharper question helps: “what is the cost of not deciding this week?” Most teams never calculate that number. They only calculate the cost of deciding.
Data Has Become a Comfort Blanket, AI Made it Heavier
More data should create clarity. Reality often goes the other way.
Harvard Business Review has written about how data-driven decision-making can go wrong, including pitfalls where organisations confuse measurement with judgement and treat numbers as a substitute for thinking.
Microsoft’s 2024 Work Trend Index adds the workplace behaviour shift: 75% of global knowledge workers report using generative AI, and use has nearly doubled in six months in that period.
AI makes it easier to generate analysis quickly. That sounds like a win until it meets a crowded stakeholder environment. More analysis often creates more debate, not less. Everyone can produce “proof” for their preferred option. The organisation becomes skilled at arguing and slow at committing.
HBR’s more recent point that AI can intensify work rather than reduce it, helps explain why some teams feel more stretched even as tools improve.
Tools speed up output. They don’t automatically speed up decisions.
A good test of whether data is helping or hiding is to look at what happens after the insight is shared. If the output ends in “interesting,” data has become entertainment. If it ends in “we will do X by Friday,” data is doing its job.
Most CPG teams don’t need more dashboards. They need fewer decisions left open.
The Hidden Culprit: Decisions that Nobody Can Explain
Gridlock thrives in unclear ownership.
When people don’t know who has the right to decide, everyone behaves as if everyone does. That creates two failure patterns. One is endless consensus-building. The other is quiet veto power, where decisions get reversed later because someone important was not consulted at the right moment.
Asana’s “work about work” framing is useful here. Their research notes knowledge workers spend 60% of their time on “work about work,” such as chasing updates, unnecessary meetings, and switching between tools. That is the perfect habitat for unclear decision rights. The organisation stays active, yet outcomes drift.
Atlassian’s meeting research captures the emotional impact. People feel drained and work overtime because meetings consume the day. Overtime becomes the hidden tax the organisation pays for indecision.
Mid-level managers often get labelled “the bottleneck” in these environments. That’s unfair.
Many mid-level leaders are the only people trying to protect quality, manage risk, and keep teams aligned across functions. The real bottleneck is the system that forces every decision through too many hands, then punishes the person who makes a call.
A question worth asking in every project kickoff is simple and specific: who decides, who advises, and who executes? When that is not written down, gridlock is not a surprise. It’s a feature.
The Decision Rhythm: a Practical Way to Restore Momentum Without a Reorg
Decision gridlock doesn’t require a huge transformation programme to fix. Most teams can reduce it within weeks by redesigning how decisions get made and communicated.
Start with a reality anchor. Microsoft’s research notes that a large share of meetings occur during peak productivity hours and that many meetings are ad hoc. That means focus time is already under attack. Adding more meetings to “solve” gridlock often makes it worse.
A better rhythm is built around three habits:
- The first habit is a weekly “decision list,” not a weekly status meeting. The agenda is not updates. The agenda is the decisions that must be made in the next seven days to keep growth moving. A short list is a success signal. A long list is a leadership warning.
- The second habit is a single owner for each decision, with one deadline and one success metric. Asana’s research on meeting waste makes the case for why this matters: managers already lose almost a workday each month to unproductive meetings. Clear ownership reduces meeting volume because fewer people feel the need to “stay close” to decisions.
- The third habit is a clean decision record. One paragraph: what we decided, why, what we ruled out, what changes if new evidence arrives. That record prevents decisions being reopened casually, which is one of the most common sources of organisational fatigue.
None of this requires a new tool. But they do require courage, clarity, and a leader who insists that decisions are the product.
Two Global Case Patterns Worth Stealing
Unilever’s communication about becoming faster and simpler is one public example of a bigger trend in CPG: stripping complexity so teams can execute.
Nestlé’s annual review language about end-to-end data flow to react faster shows another side: speeding decisions by reducing uncertainty and delays across the value chain.
Those examples are not “do what the giants do.” They are proof that the pressure is universal. CPG is being forced to make cleaner decisions with less waste.
McKinsey’s note about SKU reductions of 80–90% offers a more tactical pattern.
Companies don’t cut SKU complexity because they enjoy saying no. They do it because saying yes to everything quietly destroys execution quality.
Many mid-sized CPG companies are stuck with bloated portfolios not because strategy demanded it, but because nobody had the decision rights and courage to remove what no longer earns its place.
A practical takeaway for mid-level leaders is surprisingly energising. A well-framed simplification decision is one of the fastest ways to create visible impact. Visible impact creates credibility. Credibility creates career momentum.
That matters because many mid-level managers are doing important work that never becomes a story senior leaders tell. Gridlock work can become a story senior leaders feel immediately.
Making it Easier
Decision gridlock often feels like “a culture issue,” which makes it hard to fix because culture feels vague. A structured diagnosis turns it into practical work.
C3Centricity’s QC2™ framework can be used as a simple lens when a decision keeps stalling. The question then becomes, is the blockage coming from:
- the company (ownership and governance)
- the consumer (clarity on what must change)
- the brands (trade-offs and role clarity)
- or the processes (handoffs, approvals, and data)?
That frame helps a team stop blaming each other and start locating the true constraint.
C3Centricity’s other popular and highly praised framework, this one for actionable insight development (CATSIGHT™), can be used to sharpen the most common decision trap in CPG: objectives that are too broad to act on.
Many teams say they want “growth,” “premiumisation,” “more loyalty,” or “better innovation.” Those are outcomes, not behaviour change.
CATSIGHT™’s discipline of translating objectives into the consumer attitude or behaviour that must change helps a team choose actions and stop arguing about opinions.
Conclusions
Decision gridlock is not a personality problem. It’s an operating system problem.
Microsoft’s interruption data, Asana’s unproductive meeting research, and Atlassian’s meeting overload findings all point to the same reality: modern work habits are making commitment harder, not easier.
CPG cannot afford that, because growth depends on momentum, and momentum depends on decisions that stick.
Mid-level managers are in the best position to fix this, because they sit where insights meet execution. The leader who restores a clean decision rhythm becomes the person everyone trusts when the organisation feels stuck.
That is how company momentum comes back.
That is also how careers move again.
Time to Take Action
If decision gridlock is showing up in your business, start small.
Pick one stalled initiative and run a short diagnosis: where is the blockage, what behaviour must change, who decides, and what gets shipped in the next two weeks.
The QC2™ Evaluator can help pinpoint where the system is leaking momentum, then CATSIGHT™ can help translate the objective into a clear behaviour change that makes the next decision obvious.
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