Who decides?
Decision systems vs. tribal knowledge
The corridor decision
Several years ago, as a PM at a well-funded startup, I spent about a month working on a business case to pivot to an underserved section of the market. I had the data: customer and target feedback, competitive analysis, and a business model for the change. I’d run a pilot to validate the model. I presented it to my leadership, sent them on all of the required collateral, and waited.
Nothing happened.
Six weeks later, I discovered the decision had already been made. A director had mentioned a different idea to the CEO over coffee, and they’d agreed to prioritise that. No business case required. No data consulted. A conversation between colleagues reset the business direction.
I’d made the mistake of thinking that the organisation chart showed how decisions were made. I was wrong.
The tribe decides
Every organisation has a decision system. Very few have designed one.
What exists instead is an accumulation. A layer of approval added after a project went wrong. A steering committee set up when two teams clashed over priorities. An escalation path invented by someone who left three years ago, the reasons for which have faded into obscurity. A daily meeting for ‘decisions’ added to leaders’ calendars where no decisions ever get made.
Everything else in the organisational stack derives from how decisions get made. Planning falls apart when the timing of prioritisation decisions don’t align with the planning cycle. Product thinking can’t take root if every pivot requires re-approval from a committee that meets monthly (arguably if it requires re-approval from anyone outside the product team). Flow systems stall when teams are waiting for a decision that’s stuck in someone’s inbox.
Decision systems are the base layer. Organisations obsess over individual decisions but don’t address how decisions get made. When the formal system is unclear, an informal one takes its place. Personal relationships become the decision-making infrastructure.
Nobody is gaming the system. They’re navigating it. People find the fastest path to a decision, and the fastest path is often through a person, not a process. If a tenured engineer knows that a particular VP will say yes to anything framed as a reliability investment, that’s where they’ll go. If there are no written decision processes, then the tribe will draw its own map. Newcomers have to learn it, and frustration follows. Not just for the newcomers, but for the experienced people who have to act as pathfinders.
Five layers of clarity
In another role, I was trying to raise funding with an organisation in China. Very early in the relationship, it was made clear to me that any proposal we made would pass through five layers of approval before a decision was reached. Each layer had a defined scope of authority. Everyone in the organisation knew exactly how much decision-making power rested at each level. The bureaucracy was astounding, but it was accepted by everybody as how the organisation worked.
It had one thing that most Western organisations lack: clarity. Nobody in that organisation wondered who could approve their proposal. Nobody escalated a decision because they weren’t sure whether they had the authority to make it themselves. In many respects, what looks like unwieldy bureaucracy is better than many ‘flexible’ and ‘fast-moving’ organisations, where things still get pushed to the higher reaches. Not because the hierarchy demands it, but because people don’t know how much authority they have. The result is that senior leaders become bottlenecks for decisions they never asked to own.
There’s no getting away from the social aspect of organisations. There will always be informal routes of influence. The trick is to stop them being the default, the only path of decision-making. That’s when things feel broken.
The false fix
The instinct, when decision-making feels broken, is to add process. Write down a framework. Create a RACI matrix. Build an approval workflow. Establish a governance framework.
These things feel like solutions because they’re actions. Something was broken; now there’s a document. But documentation without substance is weight without structure. A RACI chart that nobody reads is not a decision system. An approval workflow that exists because someone got burned once is not risk management, it’s scar tissue.
More process doesn’t solve the problem if it’s another thing that a newcomer will have to decode through trial, error, and the kindness of a colleague with enough experience to know the workarounds.
The flow of clarity
So what’s the alternative? Clarity. Not more governance, but a deliberate effort to make authority visible, to tell people where they stand so they can act with confidence.
“The degree to which the opportunity to use power effectively is granted to or withheld from individuals is one operative difference between those companies which stagnate and those that innovate.” - Rosabeth Moss Kanter
The operative word is granted. Clarity about authority is not a loss of control. It’s the mechanism by which control becomes productive.
A simple flow helps: context, trade-offs, dissent, decisions.
Context means being explicit about the opportunity and the cost before a decision is made. What’s the projected upside? Why this and not something else? How is this in the organisation’s interest? Not a business case, a shared understanding of what’s at stake, the thing that prevents pet projects going through unchecked.
Trade-offs means naming what you’re choosing not to do. Every decision to prioritise one thing is a decision to deprioritise something else. Making this visible prevents the fiction that everything is equally important. It also forces the decision-maker to confront the cost, which is the discipline that separates a considered choice from a reaction.
Dissent involves farming for challenge before the decision is final. Invite diverse voices. Score the idea. Solicit objections. If the objections don’t persuade, press ahead; people can complain and commit. But they need to have been heard first.
Decisions are the point of all this. Start recording what was decided, why, and what you expected to happen. Create a decision log, published as requests for comment while pressing ahead, not as a request for permission. Over time, these records become a body of evidence: how many decisions were made, where they originated, what the outcomes were. The decision system becomes visible and improvable.
Designing your decision system
Everyone in the organisation should be able to answer these three questions about their own work:
What can I decide without asking anyone?
What needs to be escalated, and to whom?
How quickly does this type of decision need to be made?
When people cannot answer these questions, it’s not because the answers are complicated, but because nobody has ever made them explicit. Authority in most organisations is discovered through experience.
Making these three questions answerable is not just a question of adding processes and writing documentation. The documentation is the result of a series of conversations between leaders and teams. A director sits with her PMs and says: here are the decisions you own outright. Here’s where I want to be consulted. Here’s where I’ll trust your judgement unless the cost exceeds a threshold we agree on together. When a new type of decision comes up that doesn’t fit these categories, we’ll talk about it and add it.
This doesn’t have to be a massive transformation programme. These three questions are as useful for a new EM to ask of her director as they are for a director to establish with her teams.
It’s deceptively simple: write down how things get done, and then be humble enough to iterate on it. The discipline is in doing it consistently, not in doing it elaborately. To prevent this becoming another instance of tribal knowledge, schedule regular reviews and retros.
Clarity is a kindness
Clarity isn’t without consequence, especially when it first appears. When a leader makes her authority boundaries visible, she also makes visible the places where authority is unclear, contested, or hoarded. The VP who informally approves everything by being in the right meeting now has to decide whether that authority is real or accidental. The director who escalates every hard decision upward has to confront why. Replacing the default may involve discomfort, but the payoff is significant.
Teams that understand their autonomy and its limits move faster. Not recklessly, with confidence. A PM who knows she can commit to a direction after a conversation with her team and a check against the strategic objectives will act on evidence. A PM who doesn’t know the boundaries of her authority will act on relationships, because that’s the only reliable system available to her.
Clarity is a kindness. It tells people how to participate without having to fully decode the tribe first. It turns decision-making from a skill that rewards tenure into a system that rewards evidence. It gives newcomers the same access to the decision system that the tenured director has always had.
Every organisation has a decision system. The question is whether you’ll design one, or leave it to the tribe to map their own.