Decision rights: the quiet reason execution slows

When execution slows, organisations reach for the two familiar explanations: a capability problem, so we train or hire; or a motivation problem, so we incentivise or exhort. Both diagnoses flatter the organisation, because both locate the fault in individuals. In my experience, the more common culprit is neither. It is architectural. Nobody is certain who is entitled to decide what, so decisions travel.

You can watch it happen in any meeting. A question that should be settled in the room is "taken away." A manager makes a call, then re-makes it upward as a recommendation, just to be safe. An executive sits on something for three weeks, not from indecision, but from genuine uncertainty about whether it is theirs to decide. None of this is visible in any report. It shows up only as a feeling (things used to move faster) and as a chief executive whose calendar has become the organisation's bottleneck.

Escalation as the default setting

Ambiguous decision rights always resolve in the same direction: upward. Escalation is the rational response to uncertainty; nobody was ever sacked for checking with the boss. But every unnecessary escalation carries three costs. The decision waits in a queue. The person best placed to make it, the person closest to the information, hands it to someone further away. And the organisation quietly learns that deciding is dangerous and deferring is safe, which is the exact opposite of the lesson execution requires.

Senior leaders often misread the resulting congestion as evidence they are indispensable. It is usually evidence of the opposite: the system beneath them has no settled answer to who decides, so it defaults to them for everything.

Making rights explicit

The remedy is unglamorous, which may be why it is rare. Decision rights need to be made explicit: the material decision types named; each one assigned an owner, a level, and required input; thresholds set for what genuinely must escalate. Written down. Agreed in front of peers. Then defended, which is the step most organisations skip, the first time someone reaches for a decision that is no longer theirs.

Accountability arrives as the other side of the same document. A leader who clearly owns a decision can be fairly held to its outcome; a leader who owns it ambiguously cannot, and knows it. Much of what gets described as an accountability culture problem is simply the shadow cast by undocumented decision rights.

The test for whether this work is needed takes one meeting. Pick the last five significant decisions your organisation made, and ask the leadership team to write down, independently, who made each one. If the answers match, your architecture is sound. In most rooms where I have run the exercise, they do not, and the surprise in that moment is the beginning of the fix.

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