The right decision - in time
How Decision Readiness helps boards and executive teams spot the decisions they risk putting off - and make them while they still make a difference.
Good boards can be late too
Most stories about poor leadership are about boards that made the wrong call. But one of the most expensive mistakes a board can make is a different one: the right decision, made too late.
Take Denmark's largest company. In December 2024, a public head-to-head trial showed that Novo Nordisk's biggest competitor delivered clearly better results in the very area that carried the company's growth. It wasn't a rumour or an analyst's guess. It was public data with a date on it.
It took more than five months before the first major leadership decision was announced in May 2025. Then came a lowered outlook, a new CEO, a large restructuring and finally a new board. None of those decisions were wrong. But the chair of the controlling foundation later told analysts himself that the board had probably been too slow to recognise what the changes in the market meant.
That is what makes the case so important. The board didn't lack competence or information. It lacked pace. And that problem isn't reserved for large listed companies. It exists in every business where the signals are there, but nobody has asked the question loudly enough.
The Novo case is described in our research paper The Eight Months. It is an unsolicited, external analysis based on public sources and made without the company's involvement. So it doesn't say what the board knew internally - only what was visible from the outside, and when.
When one decision hides another
The second case in our research series is about Bang & Olufsen. Here the question isn't pace, but which decision actually needs to be made.
B&O has changed CEO four times in roughly ten years. At the same time, the company's latest annual report shows a record gross margin of 55 percent, but an operating result before special items of only around 1 percent. So price isn't the problem. It's the costs, the scale and the execution around that high price.
When we lay several of our workbooks over the same company - succession, stakeholders, capital and execution - a pattern appears that none of them catches on its own. Repeated leadership changes risk becoming a substitute for the strategic decision underneath: should the premium strategy be carried by a new leader, a new cost structure or a new form of ownership?
We are honest that there is another explanation. B&O's commitment to its premium strategy may be a deliberate choice about brand value and long-term differentiation. So the real question isn't whether the strategy is right, but whether it has been tested against realistic alternatives and clear financial criteria. A good analysis must be able to end with the first hypothesis not holding up.
Like the Novo case, this is an unsolicited, external analysis based on public sources.
The Decision Readiness Series: 12 workbooks, one decision language
The Decision Readiness Series consists of 12 workbooks on the decisions that matter most to companies today. They all build on the same method and on the book Decision Readiness: From Good Governance to Governance 2.0, which is peer-reviewed and published internationally.
Every workbook follows the same pattern: what it's about, why it matters, and what you can do about it this quarter. And every chapter ends with its sources, so you can always see what rests on peer-reviewed research and what rests on practice data.
No. | Workbook | What it's about |
01 | AI Investment | What AI really delivers, and when to stop |
02 | Cyber Security & NIS2 | Cyber as a board responsibility, Minimum Viable Company and deepfakes |
03 | Geopolitical Risk | Supply chains, markets and scenarios |
04 | Succession & Talent | The risk in your most critical leadership roles |
05 | The Resilient Company | Leading under pressure, Minimum Viable Company and technology dependency |
06 | Stakeholder Blindness | When decisions lose touch with the outside world |
07 | The Missing Decision | The decisions nobody made |
08 | The Fundable Company | Ready for capital before you need it |
09 | Execution Tax | Why strategies fail in execution |
10 | The Future CEO | Decision Readiness for the next top executive |
11 | The Decision Value Dividend | What decision quality is worth |
12 | Your Next Role | For the experienced leader who is moving on |
The strength isn't in any single workbook. It's in the fact that they can be laid on top of each other. That's where the connections show up: that a leadership change is really a capital question, or that a cyber risk is really a supplier decision nobody has made.
The method: five steps from signal to decision
When we carry out a Decision Readiness Analysis for a company, we always follow the same five steps. That's what makes the result something you can trust.
1. Signal analysis. What could the company know, and when? We document dates, sources and uncertainty - just as in the Novo case.
2. Workbook analysis. We use the workbooks that are relevant to your situation, and we explain why each one is included.
3. Counter-hypotheses. For every key finding we formulate at least one credible alternative explanation and look at what could disprove it.
4. Decision scenarios. We describe the concrete choices, their consequences and assumptions - and the signals that should trigger action.
5. Leadership validation. Your leadership tests the findings, corrects factual errors and adds what can't be seen from the outside. Only then do the findings become recommendations.
Every finding is labelled. You can always see whether a finding is documented fact, the company's own statement, an external assessment, our analytical hypothesis or an open question. It sounds like a detail, but it's crucial. A convincing story must never be mistaken for documented knowledge - especially not when it's going to be used in a boardroom.
Behind the method lies established management research. It treats resilience as a capability built before adversity, not as a reaction to it. It shows that clear roles are what hold a leadership team together when pressure peaks. And it shows that organisations rarely collapse because of one big event, but because small problems pile up faster than they get solved.
Why it can be done in a few weeks
A thorough analysis of a company's decision-making used to take months. It doesn't anymore. Three things make the difference.
AI agents do the groundwork. Our workbooks are built so they can be loaded into an AI agent. The agent reads, sorts and summarises large amounts of information in hours instead of weeks. Research shows that employees with AI assistance became 15 percent more productive on average, and the least experienced up to 30 percent - partly because the best people's knowledge became available to everyone.
The method steers the agent. An AI can get very good at finding exactly the patterns it's asked to look for. That's why the method sets the questions, and the counter-hypotheses test the answers. The agent makes no decisions. It prepares them.
Experience does the judging. The last step is human. The analysis is done by people who have sat in the executive chair themselves and have built and transformed companies across the Nordics and Europe. They are the ones who judge what matters for your business, and what is just noise.
The result is that leadership can spend its time on what only leadership can do: testing the findings and making the decisions.
Advisory is changing shape
We're not the only ones who can see that something is shifting. It's happening across the whole consulting industry right now, and the big firms are saying it themselves.
In January 2026, McKinsey had around 20,000 AI agents working alongside its people. Eighteen months earlier the number was around 3,000. The firm's global managing partner, Bob Sternfels, has said they are moving away from the classic model where clients pay for hours and services, and towards being paid for the impact the advice creates.
In 2025, Accenture spent around 865 million dollars on a restructuring in which employees who couldn't be retrained for a working life with AI had to leave. CEO Julie Sweet put it quite bluntly: AI is becoming part of everything they do.
And then there's the flip side. In October 2025, Deloitte in Australia had to refund part of its fee to the Australian government for a report worth 440,000 Australian dollars. The report contained a fabricated quote from a court judgment and references to research that doesn't exist. The errors were linked to the use of generative AI.
The point isn't that AI is dangerous. The point is that AI makes it cheap to produce something that sounds convincing. That's why it matters more than ever to be able to see what a conclusion actually rests on. Sternfels has said it himself: "There isn't truth in AI models; there isn't judgment."
That is exactly what Decision Readiness is built for. Every finding is labelled, so you can tell documented fact from our assessment. Every recommendation is tested against a counter-hypothesis. And the final judgment is made by people who have sat in the executive chair themselves.
We're not claiming to change the consulting industry. But we believe advice should be measured by how good the decisions it leads to are, not by how many hours went into it. And we think clients deserve a new standard, where you can always see what is knowledge and what is judgment.
It's simple - and the value stays with you
For you as a company, the road is short:
1. A conversation with no strings attached. We talk about how decisions get made in your company, and where they tend to get stuck.
2. A scoping session with the chair and CEO. Which decisions and risks make the analysis relevant right now, and who needs to be involved?
3. A fixed proposal. Clear scope, timeline, deliverables and price - before we start.
During the analysis itself, your leadership answers a set of structured questions and takes part in interviews and validation. We take care of the rest of the groundwork.
Afterwards you have answers to three questions:
• Which strategic decisions are we at risk of postponing?
• Which assumptions and risks haven't we tested well enough?
• Which decisions should we make now - and which signals should trigger action later?
And this is what sets Decision Readiness apart from a traditional consulting report: the method stays in the company.The workbooks and AI agents can be used again the next time an important decision comes up. You don't just get an answer to today's question, but also the language and the tools to ask the next ones yourselves. It isn't a report for the drawer. It's a capability that stays with you.
For Nordic companies - whatever their size or industry
The method is the same whether you have 40 or 4,000 employees. It's the scope that changes. A smaller company typically starts with one strategic theme. A larger one applies the whole method across the business and presents the result to the board.
There are three reasons why the timing is right for Nordic companies now:
• The demands on leadership have gone up. NIS2 has applied in Denmark since July 2025, in Finland since April 2025 and in Sweden since January 2026, and Norway has its own Digital Security Act. What they have in common is that leadership must be able to show it has taken a position - before an incident, not after.
• The state itself is now asking for preparedness. The Danish government's Totalberedskab (total preparedness) strategy from February 2026 asks all companies to map their critical dependencies and to have a plan that gets practised.
• Many ownership changes lie ahead. For owner-managed companies, family successions and private equity funds, it's about knowing which decisions need to be in place before a new owner, a new CEO or an exit makes them urgent. Here the same method can be used across a whole portfolio.
Danish SMEs can also get funding for programmes through SMV:Pro, where LCG is a prequalified advisor.
What we promise - and what we don't
We promise a thorough and honest analysis, where you can see what every finding rests on. We promise that your leadership is involved all the way, and that the method stays with you afterwards.
We don't promise that an analysis on its own leads to better results. We measure that together with you once the decisions have been made. And we don't promise that we can see into your boardroom from the outside. That's exactly why a real analysis needs your involvement.
The most expensive thing in a boardroom is rarely the wrong decision. It's the right one, made too late.
Let's have a conversation, with no strings attached. Not a sales meeting, but a conversation about how decisions get made in your company - and where they get stuck for too long.
Write to kontakt@leadershipcapitalgroup.dk or call +45 40 73 90 20.
Morten Efferbach, Founder and Managing Director, Leadership Capital Group
Sources
Peer-reviewed research
• Efferbach, M., Decision Readiness: From Good Governance to Governance 2.0 - the method behind the series
• Brynjolfsson, E., Li, D. & Raymond, L. (2025), "Generative AI at Work", Quarterly Journal of Economics - productivity with AI assistance
• Williams, T. A. et al. (2017), Academy of Management Annals 11(2), and Duchek, S. (2020), Business Research13 - resilience as a capability built before adversity
• Weick, K. E. (1993), Administrative Science Quarterly 38(4) - roles and structure under pressure
• Rudolph, J. W. & Repenning, N. P. (2002), Administrative Science Quarterly 47(1) - when small problems pile up
Cases and public sources
• LCG research paper The Eight Months on Novo Nordisk (2026), based on company announcements, clinical trial results and the foundation's statements to analysts in October 2025
• LCG cross-workbook case on Bang & Olufsen (2026), based on the company's annual report 2024/25 and public company announcements
Regulation
• Directive (EU) 2022/2555 (NIS2) and the national laws in Denmark, Sweden and Finland
• Danish Government, Totalberedskab (February 2026)
The consulting industry and AI
• Fortune (14 January 2026), McKinsey challenges graduates to master AI tools as it shifts hiring hunt toward liberal arts majors - number of AI agents and Bob Sternfels' remarks on HBR IdeaCast
• Yahoo Finance (26 September 2025), Accenture is cutting staff it can't retrain in the age of AI - restructuring and remarks by Julie Sweet
• Associated Press via CTV News (7 October 2025), Deloitte to partially refund Australian government for report with apparent AI-generated errors
Both research papers are unsolicited, external analyses, made by LCG from public sources and without the knowledge or involvement of the companies discussed.
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