Everyone is in the room. Everyone has an opinion. Everyone contributes, nods, pushes back a little, feels heard. And then the meeting ends, and nobody actually knows who was supposed to decide anything. So the decision drifts to whoever speaks last, or whoever outranks everyone else, or to nobody, which is its own kind of decision.
The issue is not a communication problem. It is a confusion between two very different questions that get quietly merged into one: Who could weigh in on this, and who should actually decide?
A recent Harvard Business Review piece on decision rights made a version of this. Most organisations do not actually lack frameworks. They have the RACI charts, the org charts, and the carefully worded governance documents. What they lack is the discipline to keep those frameworks honest once real pressure and real hierarchy show up in the room.
Could is not should
Almost anyone in a room could have an opinion worth hearing. That is not the same as anyone being the right person to make the call.
Somewhere in every organisation there is a one-hour task quietly turning into a ten-month saga, and it is never because the task was hard. It is because seven people could weigh in and nobody was sure who should. A new button colour for the website. Should it be the blue the brand guidelines say, or the slightly different blue the CEO prefers, or the third blue that marketing tested in 2019 and everyone has strong, unresourced feelings about? Six months later there are four blues in production, a Slack channel called blue-discussion-final-v3, and nobody remembers who was actually supposed to decide, only that everyone was invited to comment.
The people who could weigh in are not automatically the people who should decide, and pretending otherwise is how a button colour outlives an entire product launch.
Power decides. Consequence lives with it.
There is a quieter distortion sitting underneath all of this that rarely gets named. Decision rights tend to get handed out based on proximity to power, seniority, title, and whoever has the loudest and most confident voice in the room. They are rarely handed out based on proximity to consequences, which means living with the outcome long after everyone else has moved on to the next meeting.
The person who signs off on the new CRM system is rarely the person who spends the next eighteen months quietly working around its limitations. The person who decides to trim the onboarding budget is seldom the one fielding a confused new hire’s third message of the week, three months later, wondering why nobody explained anything properly. The decision-maker gets to move on. The consequence stays behind with someone else, usually someone who was in the could-weigh-in category rather than the should-decide one.
This is not a call to hand every decision to whoever will feel it most. Sometimes the person best positioned to decide genuinely is the person with the broadest view, not the narrowest, most immediate stake. But it is worth noticing how rarely organisations even ask the question. Decision rights get built around who has the authority to sign, almost never around who has the most to lose if the signature turns out to be wrong.
Task-based decisions, not just task-based location
I am a genuine fan of task-based location policy, the idea that where you work should be decided by what the specific task actually needs, not by a blanket rule that applies the same answer to every day and every kind of work. Some tasks need a quiet room. Some need a room full of other people. The task decides, not the calendar.
I think decision rights deserve the same logic and almost never get it. Right now most organisations decide who gets to decide the way they decide where people work, by role and by default, not by task. The same senior person approves everything that lands on their desk, regardless of whether they are actually the best positioned person for that specific decision, purely because the org chart says so. A task-based decision policy would ask a much more useful question every single time: given what this particular decision actually requires, who is genuinely best placed to make it, not who usually gets asked.
Sometimes that is still the senior person. Often it is someone two levels down who is closer to the consequence and understands the specific terrain better than anyone above them ever will. A fixed decision hierarchy, like a fixed location policy, optimises for consistency and predictability. A task-based one optimises for actually getting the decision right, which is a different and frankly more useful goal.
There is a distinction worth being precise about here, because it is easy to blur. Listening to an expert and then making the decision they recommend is not the same as giving that expert the decision itself. In the first version, you absorb their input, you weigh it, and you still sign off. They influenced the outcome, but you own it, and they know that going in. That knowledge changes what they are willing to say. An expert who understands they are only ever advising tends to hedge, present options instead of a single clear call, and protect themselves from being blamed for a decision that was never actually theirs. In the second version, they are accountable for the outcome directly, and that tends to produce sharper, less hedged thinking, because there is nowhere to hide behind having merely advised. Consulting an expert and delegating a decision to them look similar from the outside. They are not the same thing, and treating them as interchangeable is just the could-versus-should confusion wearing a more polite disguise.
Who this actually benefits
It is also worth being honest that moving toward genuine task-based decision-making is not automatically in everyone’s interest, even when it is clearly in the organisation’s. Keeping decisions centralised with senior leaders can be personally convenient for those leaders: more visibility, more control, more credit when things go well, less exposure to being second-guessed by someone junior who turned out to be right. A leader can say the right things about pushing decisions closer to the people with the context, while quietly resisting the actual transfer of authority, because the current arrangement serves them better than it serves the organisation. That gap between what is good for the leader and what is good for the decision rarely gets named out loud, and it is usually the real reason task-based decision-making stays a talking point rather than an actual practice.
To be clear about the scale I am talking about here. I am not arguing that a merger, a major restructuring, or a decision to cut an entire function should be delegated down to whoever is closest to the day-to-day consequence. Those decisions carry weight, legal exposure, and a need for a single accountable owner that genuinely belongs at the top, and no task-based logic changes that. What I am talking about is the much larger volume of everyday decisions: the CRM, the font, the onboarding budget, and the process that quietly governs how work actually gets done. Where the habit of routing everything upward regardless of who actually understands the terrain best is where most of the real cost sits.
None of this is entirely new territory. A recent Harvard Business Review piece on decision rights covers some of the same ground, and it is worth reading in full. Roles get assigned before anyone agrees on the goal, which is how a request to change the font on the invoices grows into a project code and a recurring calendar invite nobody dares to decline. Decision rights survive right up until a senior person disagrees, at which point the beautifully laminated RACI chart quietly loses to whoever is in the room and outranks everyone else. And roles that get set once and never revisited turn into fiction, like the person still cc’d on approvals for a workflow they left two departments ago, signing off reflexively, like a phantom limb with lingering authority.
Good article. What it does not spend much time on is who actually pays for those problems and what happens when nobody decides anything at all.
Not deciding is also a decision
There is a particular kind of “coward’s paradise” where nobody technically decides anything, the meeting simply ends, the thread goes quiet, and everyone privately agrees to revisit it next quarter. This feels like patience. It is not patience. It is a decision, made by the group, to keep things exactly as they are, and it is usually the worst possible decision-maker making it, because nobody signed their name to it and nobody has to answer for the outcome.
This is where the power and consequence problem quietly compounds itself. The person with the authority to decide often has the least urgency to actually do it, precisely because they are not the one living with the cost of waiting. Stalling is cheap when you are not the one paying rent on the delay.
The vendor contract auto-renews on the old terms nobody liked. The unclear reporting line stays unclear for another year, because clarifying it would require someone to actually own the choice, and stalling lets everyone keep their hands technically clean. Stalling is the only decision in the entire organisation that gets made by consensus every single time, purely because nobody has to admit they made it.
Should and could, in the same room
None of this means the people who could contribute should be pushed out of the room. Their input often makes the eventual decision better, on the rare occasions the decision actually happens before the fiscal year ends.
In the healthiest version, we walk into the meeting already knowing what we are there to decide. Everyone hears the comments and disagreements that are actually needed, not just the ones that are nice to have. And we leave with a decision made. That is exactly why nobody builds a task force to celebrate it. Everyone who could contribute is heard. Everyone knows who to ask and who decides, not because of ego or loud voice, but because of knowledge. And when the decision is made, it does not require a project code, a recurring calendar invite, or a Slack channel with the word final in the title, followed by a number.
Who in your organisation could weigh in on your last big decision, and who should actually have made it? Who paid for it afterward, and was it the same person who signed off? And be honest, did anyone actually decide, or did it just stop being anyone’s turn to bring it up?
