Janet M. Harvey, CEO and Founder of inviteCHANGE, advancing enterprise performance through Generative Wholeness leadership.
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A growing number of leadership teams have gotten good at asking who’s missing from a decision: Naming the customer segment, the downstream team, the stakeholder nobody in the room represents.
Those actions evidence real progress. Yet, I’ve watched teams ask the question, get a clear answer and then make the exact decision they would have made anyway.
Naming the gap is diagnosis. Closing it requires changing the decision sequence itself.
Why Awareness Alone Doesn’t Change The Decision
The teams that stall here have built awareness without building a process to act on it. They surface the blind spot, feel the discomfort of seeing it and then default back to the decision architecture they already had, one tuned for speed and internal consensus, built to close conversations rather than widen them.
Gallup’s 2025 research found that only 31% of U.S. employees are engaged, the lowest level in a decade, which was estimated in 2023 to cost the economy $1.9 trillion annually in lost productivity. That number reflects, in part, the downstream cost of decisions made without the people who will live with them. Awareness changes outcomes only when it changes the decision mechanism.
The Sequence That Widens The Frame
What closes the gap is a different decision sequence, one I call the regenerative decision flow. It has five movements.
1. Pause: Interrupts the automatic move to resolution.
2. Sense: Asks what is happening internally, relationally and across the system before anyone commits to a direction.
3. Expand: Surfaces who and what is affected, including the perspectives the room holds least naturally.
4. Discern: Asks what strengthens the system over time, beyond what solves the immediate problem.
5. Commit: Means deciding, staying engaged with the outcome, and treating what happens next as information rather than a verdict.
The sequence matters. Teams that move to discern without expanding first tend to arrive at more sophisticated versions of their original answer.
What To Ask When ‘Strengthen The System’ Stays Abstract
I find that discern is where most teams need a concrete tool, because what strengthens the system stays abstract until it has categories. The Forum for the Future’s Five Capitals framework was developed as a model for sustainable organizational decision-making. The framework identifies five forms of capital that organizations draw on and affect: natural, human, social, manufactured, and financial. Applied to executive decision-making, five filters do this work:
1. Human: Effect on wellbeing and capability
2. Social: Effect on trust and relationships
3. Natural: Effect on resources and long-term renewal
4. Cultural: Alignment with values and identity
5. Financial: Viability and risk
Running a decision through all five filters helps deepen accountability, and it’s important not to skip the first steps, especially since the risks of overlooking the human and cultural consequences of organizational decisions can accumulate over time.
What This Looks Like In Practice
A manufacturing leadership team I coached faced a straightforward cost-reduction mandate: cut headcount in a critical function, move fast, communicate after the decision was final. Instead, the leader paused and asked the room three questions.
• What capability would we eliminate if we do this?
• What will this cost us in six months?
• Who needs to be in this conversation to ground our assumptions?
Those three questions did the work of “expand” and “discern” in real time. The team designed a slower reduction paired with capability redesign in place of a fast cut. The outcome preserved financial stability and reduced the human cost of the decision. The difference between the two paths was sequence, and sequence is learnable.
What This Looks Like Inside A Global Company
I think Unilever offers a concrete example. When Paul Polman became CEO in 2009, the company stopped issuing quarterly reports and earnings guidance. A year later, it launched the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan, with three goals: help more than a billion people improve their health and wellbeing, halve the environmental impact of making and using its products and improve livelihoods across its supply chain.
That is “expand” and “discern” built into the company’s operating rhythm. Removing the quarterly target changed which question each decision had to answer, and the plan named the stakeholders every major choice would be measured against, from suppliers to the people using its products.
Polman put the reasoning plainly: “You cannot be victim to the quarterly reporting.” In 2024, a later CEO scaled back several of those pledges, a reminder that a commitment held by one leader can leave with that leader.
What This Looks Like In Ownership Structure
Ecosia shows what it takes to keep the commitment from depending on any one leader. In 2018, founder Christian Kroll converted the company to steward ownership, permanently and legally giving up his right to sell it or extract profit from it. This was a binding, irreversible commitment made through the Purpose Foundation’s golden share model.
One hundred percent of profits now fund climate action, led by reforestation. To date, the company has planted more than 250 million trees across 35 countries, financed entirely by search revenue, with no mechanism for anyone to cash out.
That is “discern” and “commit” built into the legal structure rather than re-litigated every quarter. Kroll removed the choice that would have allowed financial capital to quietly win by default, which frees his organization from having to remember, every year, to weigh natural capital against it.
A Question Worth Asking Before The Next Decision Closes
Ownership restructuring is the extreme case. Any leadership team can use the flow on a single high-stakes decision this quarter: pause before the room converges, name who is affected beyond the people deciding, filter the choice through more than one form of capital and commit in a way visible enough that the team stays accountable to what happens next. The flow works on the next decision your team is about to rush.
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