How Do You Get a Steering Group to Actually Make Decisions?

The steering group meets on the second Tuesday of every month. Attendance is good. The pack goes out on time, the minutes are accurate, and the actions get logged against names. And yet the same three items reappear on the agenda quarter after quarter, worded slightly differently each time, never quite closed.

This isn't a sign of a badly designed governance structure. Most of the steering groups I've watched stall like this have the right people in the room, a sensible terms of reference, and a chair who is perfectly competent. The structure is fine. What's missing is something smaller and easier to overlook: a moment in the meeting where someone is actually asked to choose.

Look closely at the paper that goes to most steering groups and you'll find it's written to inform, not to force a decision. It sets out the background, the options, the risks, the recommendation, sometimes at real length. What it rarely does is end with a single sentence that says: this group needs to decide X today, and here is what happens if it doesn't. Without that sentence, a paper reads as an update. An update gets discussed. A decision gets made. Those are not the same activity, and a room full of capable people will happily spend forty minutes doing the first while believing they've done the second.

The chairing compounds it. A discussion about a genuinely difficult trade-off, more budget against slipping the date, one supplier against another, tends to surface at least one person who wants more information before committing. That's a reasonable instinct in isolation. But if the chair allows "let's get more detail and come back to it" to stand as an acceptable outcome, the group has just voted, without meaning to, to leave the decision open. Do that twice and it becomes the group's default posture. The item doesn't disappear. It just keeps returning, a little more urgent each time, until it eventually gets decided in a corridor between two people who were never in the room, well after the point where the steering group's input would have changed anything.

I watched this play out clearly on an infrastructure programme where the steering group needed to choose between two remediation approaches for a recurring quality issue on site. Both options had been fully worked up, costed, and timed. The paper was good. But it was framed as "for discussion", and the discussion ran long because two attendees hadn't seen the detail before the meeting and understandably wanted time to absorb it. The chair, not wanting to force a call on people who felt underprepared, agreed to bring it back next month. Next month, a third option had appeared, because the delay had given the site team room to propose something new, and the meeting spent its time comparing three options instead of confirming one. It took four months and a direct intervention from the sponsor, outside the steering group entirely, to get a decision that the original paper had already set up cleanly in month one. Nothing about the governance structure failed. The moment of decision simply never arrived, because nothing in the room's process required it to.

The fix isn't more governance. It's less ambiguity about what the meeting is for. A paper that reaches steering should say, plainly, what decision is being asked for and by when, not just what the situation is. A chair who is willing to hold the group to a decision, even an uncomfortable one, rather than let "more information" quietly become the default answer. And a distribution rule that treats papers arriving on the day of the meeting as a reason to defer to next time, not a reason to soften the ask once everyone's in the room. None of that requires new terms of reference or an extra layer of process. It requires the people running the meeting to treat "decide" as a verb the group is actually expected to do, not a word in the title of the agenda item.

Where I've seen this actually shift, it isn't because the steering group became stricter or less collegiate. It's because the papers stopped asking politely and started asking directly, and the chair stopped treating a deferred decision as a safe outcome. A steering group that closes items in the room, even difficult ones, ends up doing less work overall than one that revisits the same three items every month under a different heading. If you're trying to work out why decisions keep slipping past your own steering group, and whether the structure or the process is the actual problem, it's worth talking it through properly, so get in touch about your PMP training options and we can look at where yours is losing decisions.

Andre Malowney is a project management trainer accredited across PMI, APMG, APM and PeopleCert frameworks, working with both traditional plan-driven practitioners and Agile delivery teams. Find him on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/andremalowney.