The explicit allocation of who recommends, who must be consulted, who decides and who can veto for a given class of decisions. Cheap to define, expensive to leave undefined.
Most organisations can tell you their strategy. Far fewer can tell you, for the decision currently on the table, who actually holds the pen, and the gap between those two is where months disappear.
Last reviewed 3 July 2026 · Free and ungated
Independent challenge from the Global Board covers how the decision is being governed, not just what is being decided.
Pressure-test this decisionDecision rights define, for a given decision or category of decisions, who provides input, who recommends, who approves, who can block, and who is accountable for the outcome. Frameworks such as RACI and DACI exist to make the allocation explicit; the substance is the allocation itself, not the acronym used to record it.
When rights are unclear, organisations do not stop deciding; they decide slowly, repeatedly and defensively. Proposals tour the building collecting endorsements because nobody is sure whose endorsement suffices. Decisions get made, then remade when someone senior discovers they were not consulted. And the most corrosive pattern: everyone assumes someone more senior owns the call, so a decision that matters to five functions belongs, in practice, to none of them. Before any major commitment, the preparation question is blunt: can everyone in the room name the single person whose yes makes this happen, and would that person agree?