Who Decides? Fixing Decision Rights in Mid-Cap Organisations

Speed is a design choice

Mid-cap organisations often describe themselves as slow. The explanation offered is usually growth: we were nimble at eighty people and we are bureaucratic at six hundred. But size does not cause slowness. Undefined decision rights cause slowness, and size simply exposes them.

The symptom is familiar. A decision is discussed at a leadership meeting, then referred to a working group, then raised again at the executive, then deferred pending more analysis, then finally made by whoever has the most stamina. Nobody in that chain behaved badly. The system simply never told anyone that the decision was theirs.

Mapping decision rights

Take the twenty decisions that most affect performance in the next year. For each one, write down four things:

• The decision, phrased as a choice between options rather than a topic
• The single decider
• Who must be consulted before the call
• Who must be informed after it

The most common finding is not disagreement about who should decide. It is discovery that four people each believed they were consulted and none believed they were the decider.

One decider, always

Our DECIDER tool enforces a rule that clients initially resist and later defend: there is exactly one decider per decision. Advisers, contributors, subject matter experts and those affected all have defined roles, but only one person carries the call.

This is not autocratic. Consultation is preserved and, in most cases, strengthened, because a named decider has a strong incentive to seek out dissent before committing. What disappears is the pretence of consensus that lets everyone withhold private doubt and then relitigate the decision later.

Push decisions down with thresholds

The second lever is thresholds. Most executive agendas are clogged with decisions that should never have reached them. Publish explicit value and risk thresholds: below this dollar figure, or outside these risk categories, the accountable leader decides and informs the executive.

Two effects follow quickly. Executive meetings recover time for the choices that actually matter. And leaders one and two layers down begin to develop judgement, because they are making real calls with real consequences rather than assembling papers for someone else to sign.

Write the decision down

A decision that is not recorded will be made again. Keep a short decision record: the choice, the decider, the date, the options considered, the criteria used and the reason the chosen option won. Half a page is enough.

The value shows up six to twelve months later, when a new executive asks why the organisation is not doing the obvious thing. Without a record, the organisation reopens a settled question. With a record, it takes ten minutes to confirm the reasoning still holds, or to note honestly that conditions have changed.

What good looks like

In organisations that get this right, three things are observable. Meeting agendas distinguish between decisions and discussions, and say who the decider is. Escalations fall, because leaders know what is theirs. And when a decision turns out badly, the conversation is about the reasoning rather than the search for who to blame, because the reasoning is on the page.

Speed follows clarity. It is very hard to buy it any other way.