Death by democracy

We had a call this month with an SVP who's taken 11 compounds into clinic, across 6 biotechs. The kind of person who's seen every operational challenge biotech can throw at you. By the end of our conversation, he was asking for materials on Kaleidoscope, talking about upcoming board meetings, and stressing that they need to be in clinic next year and Kaleidoscope was the tool to get them there.

But then came the familiar refrain: "Let me ask my team what they think."

This is where deals go to die. Not because your product isn't valuable or the need for it isn't real, but because "the team" is a nebulous concept that never actually makes decisions. You end up trying to sell to a committee that doesn't exist and waiting for consensus that will never come.

It's a common pattern in enterprise discussions, and it's paralyzing teams when they can least afford it.

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When it comes to biopharma, the rationale behind this mindset is deep-rooted. Many current biotech leaders spent their early careers working for ‘old-school bosses’ who made all decisions unilaterally. There was no wider discussion (or consideration!) of what tools might actually help the team be more effective. Now that these new leaders are in charge, many have overcorrected. They don't want to be that heavy-handed boss, so they often swing in completely the other direction, making every operational decision a democratic process.

The knock-on effects are painful. On another call, someone described their current setup: "We use two different PM tools because a couple people wanted to use their preferred tools. But those tools don't let me create Gantt charts I can export, so I use a separate tool for Gantt charts."

Three tools to achieve what one can handle… because they tried to accommodate everyone's preferences instead of identifying what the organization actually needed and committing to one choice.

This is the bystander effect in action. When everyone is responsible for a decision, nobody is responsible for a decision. People wait for someone else to take the lead. Or, worse, everyone advocates for the tool they used at their last job without questioning whether it's right for this context.

You wouldn't run other parts of your company this way. You don't ask everyone what the culture should be – you decide what culture you want and hire accordingly. You don't let every team member choose their own way to track support tickets, you implement a standard process. When our CTO needs to pick compliance tools, he doesn't survey the team. He evaluates the options, makes a decision, and everyone uses what he picked. 

Not because he's authoritarian, but because that's how you maintain operational coherence. Yet somehow, when it comes to R&D tools, consensus is still the default approach.

Consider what’s happening inside organizations because of this. While teams are paralyzed in debate over which of their individual tool preferences is best, work continues in whatever fragmented way it was happening before. Data stays scattered across spreadsheets and email chains. Coordination happens through status meetings that could have been avoided. Decisions get delayed because nobody has visibility into where things stand. This is the compound effect of operating without proper infrastructure while you figure out what proper infrastructure should be.

If you recognize this pattern in your organization, acknowledge that operational decisions aren't referendums. Your job as a leader is to create systems that help the organization succeed, not to maximize individual tool preferences. Instead of asking "What program management tool does everyone like?", ask "What visibility do we need into our R&D operations?" Then pick tools that deliver that visibility.

Own the decision or delegate it clearly. Either you decide, or you give someone else clear authority to. Whichever route you go down, keep this in mind: your priority should not be to make every individual person happy. A more worthwhile priority is to make sure your organization has the infrastructure it needs to win. Sometimes that requires being willing to disappoint a few people in service of the larger mission.

Kaleidoscope is a software platform for biotechs to robustly manage their R&D operations. With Kaleidoscope, teams can plan, monitor, and de-risk their programs with confidence, ensuring that they hit key pipeline milestones on time and on budget. By connecting projects, critical decisions, and underlying data in one spot, Kaleidoscope enables biotech start-ups to save months & millions each year in their path to market.