A Decision Friction diagnostic applied to 50-staff businesses across Nairobi consistently scores above 8 (High) — driven by founder over-centralisation, slow approvals, and a 40%+ decision reversal rate.
A founder who still personally approves every expense above KES 20,000, every new hire, and every material supplier change is not governing the business. They are the bottleneck.
Applying the Decision Friction Load (DFL) diagnostic to a sample of 50-staff Kenyan SMEs yields an average score of 9.8 — squarely in the High category. The dominant contributors are founder over-centralisation (ownership ambiguity ≈ 0.75) and decision reversal rates above 40%.
The Cost
Translated into KES, a DFL score of 9.8 in a 50-staff business typically represents the equivalent of two full-time senior salaries per year — paid in delay, rework, abandoned suppliers, and reversed decisions. It is the single largest recoverable cost in most founder-led SMEs in Kenya.
The Intervention
- Define decision rights clearly — who owns what, at what threshold, without escalation.
- Reduce the number of decisions that require founder sign-off by 60% within 90 days.
- Implement a decision log and a 30-day reversal review — the data alone typically cuts reversal rates by half.