FIFA reversed Folarin Balogun’s red card suspension within a day of President Trump’s call to Gianni Infantino. One phone call, one day, one reversal. Whatever else that says about the World Cup, it says something boards should sit with: FIFA can move fast. It simply doesn’t, unless the right person is asking.

That’s worth separating from the argument I made here last week. The first piece was about “decision adherence”, whether a decision holds once made. This one is about a different lever in the same framework: “decision velocity”, how quickly an organisation acts once it has the information it needs to act. The uncomfortable finding, watching FIFA this fortnight, isn’t that it moved fast under pressure. It’s what that speed reveals about every other decision it hasn’t moved fast on, when no one with comparable leverage was asking.

Speed is not neutral

Most governance conversations treat speed as uniformly good, faster decisions, shorter approval chains, less committee drag. Our data doesn’t support that as a blanket claim.

Speed is only a virtue when it’s evenly distributed across the organisation’s decisions. When it isn’t, when some calls get resolved in a day and structurally identical ones sit for months, the speed itself becomes evidence. It tells everyone watching that the constraint was never complexity or process. It was priority, and priority tracks power.

Boards will recognise this pattern from the inside, even without a presidential phone call to point to: the governance failure flagged eighteen months ago that’s still “under review”; the whistleblower complaint that took a year to reach the board while a CEO’s pet initiative got sign-off in a fortnight; the compliance gap that’s been on the risk register for three cycles running, unresolved, next to the acquisition that closed in six weeks because someone senior wanted it done.

None of these organisations would say they move slowly. They’d say the slow things are hard and the fast things were simple. Almost never true. What’s usually true is that the fast things had an advocate with enough standing to remove the friction, and the slow things didn’t.

The tell is in the contrast, not the incident

FIFA’s problem this week isn’t really the Balogun reversal in isolation, organisations correct decisions under new information all the time, and sometimes that’s exactly right. The problem is what the reversal reveals by comparison.

FIFA has spent years fielding complaints about refereeing consistency, disciplinary process timelines, and VAR transparency, most of which move at the institutional pace such complaints usually move at: slowly, opaquely, often not at all. Then, once, the right person called, and the entire apparatus resolved a contested decision in under 24 hours.

The contrast is the story. It tells every federation, every player, every fan watching that the machinery for fast, decisive correction existed the whole time. It just wasn’t pointed at them.

That’s the diagnostic boards should be running on themselves, not “Are we fast?” or “Are we slow?” but “Is our speed consistent, or does it correlate with who’s asking?” A board that resolves a governance concern raised by a junior compliance officer in the same rough timeframe it resolves one raised by the CEO’s ally has a real answer to that question. Most boards, if they’re honest, don’t.

What this actually asks of a board

The practical response isn’t to slow down the fast decisions to match the slow ones—that would waste the organisation’s genuine capacity to move quickly when it matters. The response is to interrogate why the slow ones are slow. If the honest answer is complexity, stakeholder count, or genuine uncertainty, that holds up to scrutiny and should be stated plainly.

If the honest answer is that nobody with enough standing has pushed for resolution, that’s not a complexity problem. That’s a governance one, and it will eventually surface the same way FIFA’s just did: not through an audit, but through a contrast someone else notices and points out publicly.

Boards that can show their fast decisions and their slow decisions are governed by the same standard—not the same speed—have an answer ready before anyone asks the question. Boards that can’t are one well-connected phone call away from finding out what everyone already suspected about how decisions actually get made.

Rob Anderson is co-founder of governance consultancy Stillness Partners and co-author of The Stillness Dividend (2026).