abstract: There does not (yet) exist a general theory for describing decomposition numbers of finite reductive groups at primes different from the defining characteristic. We explain a new conjecture predicting that characters of intersection cohomology complexes related to Lusztig induction should provide many new projective characters. We also present new, almost complete results on decomposition matrices of finite unitary groups of rank at most~10. This is joint work with Olivier Dudas.