Many experienced leaders are surprised to land here. That reaction is common — and usually reflects the complexity of the situation, not the maturity of the team.
This looks like a period of orientation rather than an active commitment decision.
At this point, you’re likely sensing that something needs attention, but it hasn’t yet crystallised into a specific initiative, timeline, or investment. That’s normal — and often sensible. Many significant supply chain initiatives only fail later because they were framed too early, too narrowly, or around the wrong problem.
Crucially, this stage is not passive. It’s where experienced leaders slow down deliberately to reduce risk later.
This is where teams clarify their North Star: what they are ultimately trying to achieve, why it matters now, and what “good” would actually look like if they got this right.
The work here is less about choosing a solution, and more about understanding what kind of organisation, capability, or operating model you are really working towards.
Decisions typically move into later stages when certain conditions begin to show up:
Based on your responses, those signals don’t yet appear to be consistently present. That doesn’t mean a decision isn’t forming — only that it hasn’t yet solidified into something that most stakeholders would recognise as a concrete project requiring sustained commitment of time, attention, or capital.
In practice, this usually means that while there is intent or concern, key elements of a well-framed decision are still emerging: the real alternatives may not yet be clear, consequences are still being explored, uncertainty remains high, and it’s not yet obvious what would be hard to reverse later.
This is a common — and often sensible — position in complex contexts, where acting too early can be riskier than waiting until the decision is framed clearly enough for others to engage with it confidently.
Teams at this stage often feel pressure to “do something” before the problem is fully understood — especially when signals are coming from multiple directions.
Common patterns include:
Left unresolved, this often leads to misaligned initiatives later — particularly once finance, IT, or senior leadership need to be involved.
Another common challenge at this stage is that different functions are often working from different mental models.
Supply chain, finance, IT, and leadership may all be using different language to describe the same situation. What feels like “risk” to one group can sound like “inefficiency” or “over-engineering” to another.
Until those differences are surfaced, teams can appear aligned on the surface while talking past each other underneath.
What’s most useful here is better framing, not answers.
Leaders in similar situations typically benefit from:
This is about orientation and clarity, not commitment.
If you’re returning, or already clear on what you want to engage with, you can jump straight there:
Use BestPractice.Club in the way that’s most helpful to you right now.
BestPractice.Club is not a consultancy and does not provide advisory services based on full organisational discovery.
What you see here reflects pattern recognition drawn from many years of conversations with supply chain and operations leaders facing real, high-stakes decisions. It is intended to help you orient yourself, clarify your decision position, and understand what often proves useful at similar points — not to provide definitive advice tailored to your specific circumstances.
Any suggestions are indicative, not exhaustive, and are made without full visibility of your organisation, constraints, or risk profile. Decisions remain yours, and should be tested against your own data, context, and governance processes.
If this framing doesn’t quite fit, that’s normal. Real decisions rarely move in straight lines, and teams often revisit earlier stages as new information emerges. If it would help to talk through your situation and sense-check where you are, you’re welcome to schedule a short conversation.