Thawing decision freeze: A smarter way forward for finance leaders

The CFO remit has expanded into something resembling a catch-all for enterprise leadership. According to The CFO's Playbook for 2025, 37% of finance leaders now take on more strategic responsibility than they did five years ago. Strategy, technology, people, risk; if it requires structure, rigour, and discipline, it tends to land with the CFO.

The impact isn’t loud but it accumulates. The same research shows that 55% of CFOs are experiencing a phenomenon that’s called ‘decision freeze’. This term refers to a strategic gridlock, the kind that comes from being pulled in too many directions to move meaningfully in any one.

Decision freeze is what happens when a role meant to provide clarity begins to absorb complexity and, as the pressure builds, the decisions that matter most start slipping through the cracks.

This isn’t a crisis… yet, but it is a constraint. One worth examining. So let’s take a look at how this freeze sets in, what reinforces it, and how finance leaders can regain strategic traction without adding more to their plate.

Understanding decision freeze in today’s world

The term ‘decision freeze’ might sound dramatic. In reality, it’s pretty mundane… and pretty dangerous, too. It creeps in through back-to-back meetings, blurred remits, and the steady drip of urgent-but-not-important tasks. Over time, it distorts the CFO’s ability to focus on what truly drives business value.

This is the real context behind the numbers in the CFO’s Playbook for 2025. Yes, 55% of CFOs report struggling to make key decisions but that figure tells only part of the story. The deeper issue is a design flaw in how modern leadership is structured, and the biggest cost is, amongst others, strategic clarity.

Before we look at how to fix it, we need to understand what’s fuelling it.

Role expansion leads to cognitive saturation

The CFO seat was never meant to hold the entire business. Yet, in many organisations, it has become the gravity well for everything vaguely strategic or analytically difficult. It’s not unusual now for CFOs to lead cross-functional digital projects, chair ESG steering committees, and act as interim heads of HR, all while delivering on core financial directives.

The side effect is a decision load that exceeds any one person’s bandwidth. Decision quality suffers not because capability is lacking, but because attention is stretched across too many priorities with too little space for structured thought.

Beyond a personal productivity issue, cognitive saturation is also a leadership risk. Studies have shown that excessive cognitive load reduces decision-making flexibility and promotes default thinking, rather than conscious and analytical processing. Prioritisation becomes reactive. High-quality thinking is replaced by checklist completion. Over time, this bleeds into the strategic agenda itself, warping long-term decision-making to suit short-term capacity.

The myth of multi-threaded leadership

There’s a lingering belief in many boardrooms that the strongest leaders can manage multiple complex initiatives in parallel without compromising performance. In practice, this myth costs time, energy, and clarity.

Research into multitasking and cognitive hyperactivity supports what many finance leaders feel instinctively. Human attention isn’t endlessly divisible. The more contexts a person switches between, the more shallow each layer of thinking becomes. There is a structural impossibility of deep, meaningful insight when the mind is toggling between talent strategy, compliance frameworks, cash flow projections, and AI procurement plans.

What suffers is not speed, but discernment. CFOs might still hit deadlines, but the thinking behind those decisions—what to fund, what to pause, what to ignore—gets watered down. And so, the decisions may be technically sound, but strategically misaligned.

Spotting the symptoms early

All that to say, decision freeze rarely arrives with a warning. It builds in the background, masked by activity and good intentions. The meetings continue, the reports are filed, the decks get reviewed and presented. But somewhere in that rhythm, strategic traction begins to slip. Knowing what to look for helps finance leaders act before drift becomes inertia. 

1. Strategic drift: Big initiatives don’t fail outright; they lose momentum. Timelines blur and priorities shift. What began as a high-impact project becomes a sequence of check-ins with no forward movement because no one has the focus left to carry it through.
   
   
2. Risk aversion in disguise: Caution has its place, but when every decision demands another round of analysis, the issue is overload, not risk. Reframed as due diligence, delay becomes the default. What looks like thoroughness can, in reality, be a slow exit from decisive leadership.
   
   
3. Delegation without direction: Tasks get handed off, but guidance doesn’t follow. Teams move but without alignment or clarity. In this environment, execution continues, all while coherence fractures. When leaders are stretched too thin to steer, decisions made downstream drift off-course upstream.

How can CFOs get unstuck?

It’s not about doing more, it’s about structuring better. Here are three strategies to help regain clarity and control.

• Clarify the true remit

Without clear boundaries, the CFO role becomes a catchment for anything that feels complex or cross-functional. Clarifying remit means deciding which decisions require finance leadership and which are better shaped by influence. The aim is to focus attention on decisions where finance brings a unique perspective—capital allocation, structural choices, enterprise risk—rather than diluting impact across issues that can be owned elsewhere.

• Prioritise through purpose

When priorities compete for attention, the loudest tends to win. A defined purpose acts as a sorting mechanism. It allows the CFO to assess demands not on volume or visibility, but on strategic fit. If every decision connects back to a few non-negotiable objectives—such as capital efficiency, margin expansion, or long-term value creation—it becomes easier to move with speed and intention, without losing direction.

• Build a decision architecture

Decisions scale when the structure around them is sound. That means establishing clarity on ownership, creating information flows that support context-rich choices, and setting thresholds for escalation. A strong architecture reduces unnecessary dependencies and keeps momentum up, even when the volume of work is high. The CFO doesn’t need to decide everything; they need to ensure the right decisions are made, consistently, by the right people.

Tools for thawing the decision freeze

Addressing decision freeze starts with rethinking the mechanics of decision-making. The focus isn’t on doing more, but on designing systems that make better use of time, attention, and judgement. The right tools don’t accelerate everything. Instead, they create space for higher-quality decisions. These three are proving particularly effective:

• Strategic Use of AI

  AI earns its place when it removes effort without removing oversight. In finance, its real strength lies in automating precision-heavy work like forecasting, variance analysis, and exception handling. These applications shift time and energy toward the decisions that require human judgment.
  
  

• Performance management that supports focus

  When performance frameworks reward activity, noise tends to dominate signal. The role of performance management is to create clarity about what matters most. This sharpens alignment across teams, directs attention to the outcomes that move the business, and reduces the overhead of constant course correction.
  
  

• Data designed for decision-making

  Most dashboards inform. Unfortunately, fewer of them guide, and the difference lies in intent. Finance teams should treat data as a decision-support tool, not a reporting layer. That means building views around the choices leaders need to make, not around the metrics that happen to be available.

A return to strategic clarity

Decision freeze is the cumulative result of a role that’s grown faster than the systems built to support it. As the CFO’s Playbook for 2025 makes clear, finance leaders are now central to enterprise direction—but without clear remit, structure, and support, that influence begins to diffuse.

Thawing decision freeze means designing your function to protect clarity. Fewer distractions, stronger filters, better tools. That clarity starts with the big picture, but it sharpens in the details, especially in areas like treasury, where operational discipline meets strategic intent.

For finance leaders ready to dive into it, our Buried Treasury report explores how to strengthen the function, prioritise smarter decisions, and turn treasury into a true growth driver for your business.