Who actually decides? Why decision rights slow you down
In your organisation, what actually determines where and how execution decisions get made?
Decision-making is the wiring that runs through strategy execution. It only works when you've deliberately designed where decisions sit and who owns the call.
Yet, most organisations don't actively define, communicate or monitor decision-making. Then they wonder why execution slows.
When you don't intentionally design the decision-making system, the organisation improvises. Teams don't just slow down; they start guessing, escalating, and reworking decisions that should have been clean. Decisions drift to the safest place, the biggest meeting, or the most senior person.
That's when pace collapses.
I saw this on a major enterprise systems programme.
The organisation valued collaboration, so they ran a weekly SteerCo with most of the executive team, regularly pulling Tier 3 leaders into the room. It looked robust. It also trained the organisation to escalate.
They hadn't agreed on key decisions up front, collectively or across functions, so everything defaulted to SteerCo. Even decisions that Tier 3 leaders were fully capable of making got pulled upward, then dissected and re-litigated in the room.
People with the authority and context to make design calls stopped making them. Decisions travelled up to leaders who cared and wanted to help, but didn't live in the details. Leaders hesitated, teams wrote bigger packs, and the programme slowed.
The hidden cost wasn't just meeting time. Teams spent more time explaining and justifying decisions than designing and delivering. Ownership blurred, decision velocity dropped, trust eroded.
Escalation isn't a culture problem. It's what people do when they aren't certain they're allowed to decide. Naming who owns what, and who decides at which level, is part of what Operating Model sets up.
The design principle is straightforward: some decisions need a forum where leaders trade off cross-functional impacts. Others need a single owner with the remit and expertise to make the call. This programme had lost that distinction.
This is why decision rights aren't a bolt-on. It's a critical part of the execution system, and it needs to be designed.
It turns governance from a set of meetings into a system that actually executes. Ownership either sharpens here, or it disappears as when nobody can point to the decision-maker, execution can't move.
This is part of lever 4 (Governance & Decision Rights) of the Strategy Execution by Design Model. See the full framework →
Not sure which of the seven levers is holding your execution back? Take the Strategy Execution Maturity Model Assessment →
Written by Rebecca Reti, strategy and execution consultant working with boards and executive teams across Australia and New Zealand.
There's a practical decision map in the carousel, covering what decisions matter, where they should sit, and how to keep escalation predictable rather than political. See the carousel on LinkedIn →