Main idea

As long as an arbitration is postponed, the organization feels it is not choosing yet. It is choosing nonetheless: it accepts a commercial opportunity that passes by, a learning that does not happen, coordination energy spent, a market window closing, a confusion that accumulates. The decision to wait has a price, and that price runs from the day it is taken.

This cost has a property that explains its discretion: it never takes the form of an immediate expense. Nothing is invoiced, no budget line moves, nobody signs. As long as it is not stated, it stays abstract — and it becomes very easy to prolong the discussion, to ask for one more analysis, to wait for the next meeting, since none of those extensions appears to cost anything.

Putting a value on lost time does not turn the arbitration into a calculation. The estimate stays rough and that does not matter: the effect comes not from its precision but from the fact that it forces an answer to a question otherwise avoided — what do we lose by not deciding now?

Why it matters

This strips waiting of its status as a neutral option, which is what makes it attractive: comparing two directions becomes comparing three, one of which has a price attached.

It also gives you a handle in a meeting faced with a request for more analysis: not to contest its usefulness, but to ask what its duration costs.

Nuances and limits

The estimate lends itself to the opposite abuse: a cost of delay estimated with confidence can serve to force a premature decision on a genuinely uncertain subject, by giving an intuition the appearance of a calculation.

And not all delays are equal: some postponements have almost no cost because the window aimed at is distant, and treating them all as urgent exhausts the tool.

Open questions

• On which delays is a rough estimate enough to change a decision, and from what point does the imprecision of the figure make it more manipulable than useful?