The Decision You Made Last Year Is Still Running. Nobody Knows Why.
The Decision You Made Last Year Is Still Running. Nobody Knows Why.
Free shipping over £75.
You set that threshold eighteen months ago. Quick decision. You were losing carts at checkout, ran the numbers on average order value, picked a figure that felt right. Implemented it in fifteen minutes.
It's still there. Running every day. Shaping customer behaviour, affecting margins, influencing how your team thinks about promotions.
The problem: your average order value has shifted. Your shipping costs went up twice. Your product mix changed completely when you dropped that supplier in April. The maths that made £75 sensible doesn't exist anymore.
But the rule keeps running. Nobody questions it because nobody remembers it was a decision at all.
This is what I call a ghost decision. A choice you made once, in a specific context, that embedded itself into how your business operates — and then the context disappeared while the behaviour stayed.
Ghost decisions are everywhere once you start looking.
The 2% early payment discount you offer suppliers. Made sense when cash flow was tight and you needed the goodwill. Cash flow isn't tight anymore. The discount costs you £400 a month.
The rule that all customer complaints go through you personally. Instituted after one bad incident two years ago. The team member who mishandled it left eight months later. You're still CC'd on every complaint.
The weekly team meeting that runs 90 minutes. Started when there were three of you and alignment was genuinely hard. Now there are seven people, half of whom sit silently while the other half cover ground that could be a five-minute async update.
The API integration that syncs inventory every four hours instead of real-time. Set up that way because real-time was expensive and you only had one sales channel. Now you have four channels and overselling is a monthly headache. The four-hour sync is still running.
Ghost decisions compound in a specific way. They don't break things dramatically. They create drag.
A 3% margin leak here. An hour of unnecessary coordination there. A constraint that shapes how your team thinks about what's possible.
The dangerous part: because these decisions predate most of your current reality, they feel like facts. Like physics. "That's just how we do it" is the tell. When someone says that and can't explain why, you've found a ghost.
There's a simple exercise that surfaces these. Pick any recurring process, rule, or policy that's been stable for more than six months. Ask three questions:
What was true when we set this up? Not what's true now. What was the situation, the constraint, the concern that made this the right call at the time?
What's changed since then? Be specific. Costs, team size, tools, customer behaviour, product mix, your own capacity.
If we were starting fresh today, would we make the same choice? Not "is it working well enough" — would you actively choose this again, knowing what you know now?
The gap between the first answer and the third is where the ghost lives.
A founder I worked with ran this on their approval workflows. Discovered that purchase orders over £500 still required her sign-off — a rule from when £500 was a significant percentage of monthly cash. Three years later, with 20x the revenue, she was approving orders that represented 0.1% of monthly spend. Forty-five minutes a week, minimum.
She'd never thought to change it because the approval requests just appeared in her inbox and she just handled them. The decision had become invisible.
Another example: a team that still manually verified every new customer's first order before shipping. Started after a fraud incident that cost them £2,000. That was four years ago. They'd since added address verification, card checks, and fraud scoring that caught 99% of issues automatically. The manual verification caught nothing. But it added 24 hours to every new customer's delivery time.
The fix isn't complicated. Build a recurring trigger — quarterly works for most businesses — to audit decisions that have been running longer than twelve months. Not a massive review. Just a quick pass through your rules, thresholds, policies, and workflows with those three questions.
What was true? What changed? Would you choose this again?
Most things will pass. The ones that don't will be obvious. And undoing them is usually far simpler than you expect, because the original constraint is already gone.
Somewhere in your business right now, a decision you made in a different context is quietly shaping your costs, your speed, or your team's assumptions about what's fixed. It's not broken. It's just no longer right.
If surfacing those and working out which ones to unwind sounds useful, that's the kind of thing we help with.