About your facilitators:
David Maclean · Founder, SCAR Advantage™. Associate faculty at Henley Business School Africa, Chief Learning Officer at LearnSmartly, and author of UNPLAN.
Mike Jansen · Practice Partner, SCAR Advantage™, leading the leader-side of the SCAR work. Co-launched the South African National Lottery, ran IT delivery for Standard Bank’s wholesale division, and rescued large software programmes at Dis-Chem, Absa, and Anglo.
Come with one decision that should not still be this difficult.
We’ll help you see what it is costing, why it keeps travelling or stalling, and what to change.
The decisions at the top determine how far the organisation can go
A business cannot scale cleanly if important decisions still depend on a few people
Succession is not real if authority changes on the org chart but decisions continue travelling back to the founder, CEO or Exco.
And governance stops protecting the organisation when controls create more drag than the risk they were designed to contain.
You experience all three in the decisions
- The approval that still routes through Exco
- The decision agreed last month and reopened this month
- The leader with authority who still asks permission.
- The safeguard introduced after an incident five years ago that nobody has examined since.
These patterns are decision drag: inherited responses that once protected the organisation but now slow it down.
Three measures. One live decision. SCAR Advantage measures only three things:
- Decision speed - how long the decision takes from surfacing to an owned call
- Executive escalation - how often the decision travels upward when it should be resolved at the appropriate level.
- Financial impact - the margin, cost or value consequence of the pattern, measured conservatively where attribution is defensible.
Why these three? Because persistent drag in them constrains three things every serious organisation eventually needs: scalability, succession and governance that protects rather than obstructs.
Event information
Date: Wednesday 26 August 2026
Time: 07h00–09h00
Venue: Henley Africa campus, 1 Witkoppen Rd, Paulshof, Johannesburg, 2191
Facilitators: David Maclean & Mike Jansen - SCAR Advantage
Cost: Free
What happens in the room:
This is a working session. Bring one decision from your organisation that is slower, more escalated or more expensive than it should be.
David Maclean and Mike Jansen of SCAR Advantage™ will take you through the work on that decision:
- Name the decision and establish a simple baseline.
- Trace what happened and the response the organisation built around it.
- Separate protection that is still necessary from inherited drag.
- Design two replacement rules with clearer authority, boundaries and escalation criteria.
- Build a 30-Day Decisive Loop for applying the new rules in live work.
You will leave with
- One costly decision identified — rather than a generic organisational problem.
- A three-measure baseline — decision speed, executive escalation and financial impact.
- The drag located — what happened, what the organisation did in response, and what it is still doing.
- Two replacement rules — designed around the live decision and stress-tested in the room.
- A 30-Day Decisive Loop — a practical route for moving the decision from stuck to owned.
What we mean by a scar
The pattern usually made sense once. A failure led to another approval. A surprise pulled authority upward. A restructure blurred who could decide. A compliance incident created a safeguard.
The response worked, so the organisation kept it. The pressure passed; the protective behaviour did not. SCAR Advantage calls that inherited defensive pattern a scar.
The point is not organisational archaeology. We examine the scar only because it is still shaping a decision that matters now.