McKinsey’s latest State of Grocery Retail MENA report surfaces a pattern that shows up across the region, well beyond grocery: consumer confidence is rising, investment activity is up, new capacity is being built — and growth has slowed anyway.
The paradox isn’t unique to retail. Ask a mid-market CEO in UAE or Saudi how business is going and the answer is usually cautiously optimistic. Their pipeline looks reasonable. They’ve invested in the infrastructure. The data team is busy.
Ask them about decision speed. Ask whether the executive team made more decisions in the last quarter than the quarter before. The answer is usually a longer pause.
That gap — between activity and outcomes — is what McKinsey’s data is showing. And it’s not a data problem.
What the paradox actually is
The growth paradox isn’t that MENA is struggling. The region is outperforming every other major market globally. The paradox is that the indicators that should produce growth — confidence, investment, expanded capacity — are all present, and the translation into faster revenue growth is harder than expected.
The standard explanation is macroeconomic: interest rates, currency pressure, market saturation. Some of that is true.
But the organizations we’re working with don’t look like they’re losing to macro conditions. They look like they’re losing to their own operating speed.
The organizations with the most sophisticated data infrastructure are often the ones still making decisions the same way they did three years ago — through meetings that run long, with too many people in the room, producing commitments that nobody is formally accountable for afterward.
This is a decision architecture problem. It’s not visible in the dashboard metrics. It’s visible in what the executive team can actually point to as having changed in the last 90 days.
Why activity isn’t translating
The pattern McKinsey documented has a structural explanation that their report doesn’t name.
Most organizations have optimized for report production, not decision production. The data team builds dashboards. The analyst team produces weekly updates. The executive team reviews them in a standing meeting. Nobody disagrees with the numbers — the disagreement is about what to do about them, and that conversation isn’t formally structured anywhere.
The meeting produces alignment in the room. It doesn’t produce a decision with an owner and a deadline.
When consumer confidence drops or a competitor moves faster, the executive team reacts — but the reaction is a new meeting, not a pre-committed response. The infrastructure is sophisticated. The decision process isn’t.
This is why the growth paradox is hardest to see from inside. The dashboards are showing exactly what you’d expect. The decisions are moving at the speed the operating model allows, which is slower than the market requires.
The organizations that are pulling ahead
The companies in MENA that are growing despite the paradox share a structural feature that’s easy to miss in a site visit.
Their leadership teams have made faster decisions a specific, named priority — not as a cultural aspiration, but as an operating process with owners and timelines.
This shows up practically: before a data initiative gets scoped, there’s a definition of the specific decision it enables. The metric definitions are locked before the reporting layer gets built. The weekly review has a published agenda with named decision points, not just a slide deck.
These aren’t large interventions. They’re specific. The question “who decides what by when” gets asked before the dashboard gets built.
The companies getting this right aren’t necessarily the ones with the most sophisticated data stacks. They’re the ones whose infrastructure serves a decision process — rather than the other way around.
The decision that comes before the dashboard
If the growth paradox sounds familiar — if your organization has invested in data infrastructure and the decision speed hasn’t changed — the question worth asking is surgical:
What is the one decision your leadership team most needs to make faster?
Not “give us visibility.” More specific. A decision that has a name, an owner, a timeline, and a consequence if it slips. The kind of decision where you know exactly what information would change the answer.
Start there. Build backward from that decision to the data it requires. Retire everything that doesn’t serve it.
Most organizations will find they have more decision infrastructure than they realized — and less decision velocity than the dashboard count suggests.
McKinsey documented the problem. The fix isn’t a new report. It’s a narrower, more honest conversation about what decisions actually need to happen, and who owns them.
We work with analytics leaders who have the infrastructure but need the decision velocity to match. If the growth paradox sounds familiar, we should talk.
Ready to work backward from the decisions your organization actually needs to make?