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.