Five Questions That Reveal Whether Your Decision Architecture Is Serving Your Team
The Ipsos Marketing Anchors study, produced in partnership with Professor Mark Ritson, points to a system that frequently prevents marketing evidence from reaching the decisions that matter. Most organisations operate across multiple data systems, research suppliers, and internal platforms, each with its own definitions, ownership, and rhythm. The result is rarely a shortage of information. It's a shortage of a single, coherent view that can be brought to the decisions that matter, quickly and with confidence. These five questions help reveal whether your information environment is serving your team, or working against it.
1. Do you know where the commercial decisions in your organisation actually get made?
Not in theory. In practice. Which forums, at which level, on what cadence, result in choices that materially affect your brand and business? Marketing functions with strong research capability can still find themselves producing insight for audiences who aren’t present at the moment the choice is made. Understanding the actual decision geography of your organisation is the starting point for designing information to serve it.
2. When a major decision is being made, is marketing evidence genuinely in the room?
Not as a pre-read or an appendix, but as a live input that shapes how the choice is framed. Influence in the decision room depends partly on relationship, but also on whether the information marketing provides is structured to speak to the decision being made, rather than to the question that was asked three months ago.
3. Are your KPIs built around your decisions, or around your data?
Most organisations' KPI sets reflect what is measurable rather than what is decision-relevant. Volume metrics are easy to produce and hard to act on in the context of strategic trade-offs. If the metrics used in planning conversations differ from those used in performance reviews, that is a signal that the measurement framework has grown around the data rather than around the decisions it should be serving.
4. When a new question lands on your desk, how long does it take to get a credible answer?
Not a perfect answer. A credible one, good enough to take into a decision. Where the answer is measured in weeks rather than days, the information environment is adding latency that compounds under pressure. In most cases that latency isn’t a data availability problem. It’s a coherence problem: the data exists across several systems and assembling it into a single reliable view is a manual process rather than a designed one.
5. Could someone new to your organisation reconstruct your decision-making logic from your documentation?
Where institutional knowledge lives in individuals rather than systems, the quality of decision-making becomes contingent on who is in post. Leadership transitions, restructures and team changes all erode the accumulated logic of how decisions get made. That is a governance risk as much as a knowledge one.
What the answers point to
These questions aren’t a diagnostic in themselves. But the pattern of the answers reveals whether an organisation’s challenge is primarily one of data, which responds to better measurement, richer analytics, improved tooling, or one of architecture, which requires redesigning how the environment frames issues, organises information, and connects evidence to the moment decisions are made.
Decision Clarity, from Ipsos Data Labs, is designed for the second challenge. It begins by mapping where decisions are made and what they require, then works back through the framing, data, and governance changes needed to build an information environment that serves those decisions consistently, not just when the right person happens to be in the room.
If these questions surface gaps worth addressing, that’s the conversation we’re here to have.
