Global Pharmaceutical — Decision Effectiveness

A global pharmaceutical company with a wide pipeline, long investment horizons, and the usual pattern of too many promising candidates competing for the same bounded capital and attention.

Decision meetings had become presentations of pre-cooked recommendations. The actual trade-offs between candidates were made upstream, in the sponsor's team, not in the committee. The committee ratified; it did not decide.

We rebuilt the decision mechanics. The committee saw the same evidence base — not the sponsor's filtered version. Decisions were logged with their rationale, so later outcomes could be reviewed against the reasoning at the time, not against hindsight.

A short discipline change made the biggest difference: no slide was shown without the three alternative options that had been considered and the specific reason each was rejected.

The committee started saying no earlier and investing more into the fewer bets it kept. The sponsor behaviour changed because the incentive to pre-cook disappeared.