Three recent-ish reports from Gallup (the workplace analytics firm), IDC (the tech market research giant, writing with AI vendor Aera Technology), and Planview (a strategy execution software company, via independent research firm Lawless Research) have a few things in common.
What happened
Organizations are flattening. Average span of control in the U.S. jumped from 10.9 to 12.1 in a single year—a nearly 50% increase since 2013. Middle managers are being cut at disproportionate rates, a trend Gallup now calls the "Great Flattening." Meanwhile, enterprises are pouring money into AI-powered decision tools. IDC finds 88% of large organizations have implemented or are piloting "decision intelligence" initiatives. And Planview's benchmark of 800 global firms shows that strategy execution leaders are 9.5x more likely than laggards to say they can adapt quickly to market changes.
The pitch is simple: fewer managers, smarter tools, faster decisions.
What the data actually says
Quite a lot, it turns out.
- Flattening without support backfires. Gallup's meta-analysis shows that larger teams can work, but only when managers have the right capacities, spend less than 40% of their time on individual contributor work, and give meaningful feedback weekly. Strip those conditions away and engagement drops as span widens. 97% of managers already have individual contributor responsibilities. The median manager already spends 40% of their time on non-management work, so increasing their reports without reducing this IC workload doesn't seem to be a great idea.
- Too much intake, not enough processing power. IDC found that 26% of decisions are still made primarily on intuition, and another 25% on deliberate data analysis. Only 11% are driven by AI recommendations. Organizations generate insights faster than they can execute on them, with "a growing gap between information and execution." 87% rely on spreadsheets, 74% on BI dashboards, both mostly disconnected from each other. So our bottleneck appears to be in the structure, in the connections through which organizations process intelligence.
- Speed without governance makes things worse. Planview's data is striking: complex approval processes remain the #1 barrier to strategy execution, unchanged since 2021. The leaders in their study solve this not by removing governance but by centralizing coordination (52% vs. 37% of laggards) and making governance "supportive" rather than "obstructive." 78% of leaders say governance supports their ability to respond to change. For laggards, it's 31%.
OD angles
I've written before about the trouble with hierarchy, specifically how it concentrates learning at the top and redirects teams' attention from customers to internal politics. I'm sympathetic to flattening. But these three reports, taken together, suggest that the current wave of flattening is optimizing for the wrong variable.
The challenge here is the quality of decision infrastructure—the systems, habits, and frameworks that turn information into action. Structured Decision-Making, Active Steering, and Expanded Available Power all help with this by pushing genuine decision authority—along with the data, tools, and feedback loops to use it—closer to the work. Planview's leaders get this. They review strategy monthly, use integrated platforms, and standardize goal frameworks. As a result, they exceed revenue goals by 12% while laggards break even.
The Gallup finding on feedback is maybe the most important data point in the bunch: when managers give meaningful feedback weekly, roughly 70% of employees are highly engaged, regardless of team size. When they don't, it's one in four. The mechanism that makes decisions good is the conversation.
What to watch
- Manager engagement trends. Gallup reports managers are already struggling more than in recent years, with more burnout, more stress, more job-seeking. If flattening accelerates without support, expect this to get worse before it gets better.
- Decision execution rates. IDC's leading FMCG company auto-accepted 74% of AI recommendations. Watch whether that number climbs industry-wide, and whether outcomes improve or just velocity does.
- The feedback habit. Gallup's weekly meaningful conversation finding is a leading indicator for everything else. Organizations that institutionalize it will handle whatever comes next.