Where Decisions Actually Happen

Every organisation has a decision structure. Responsibilities are assigned, reporting lines are drawn, governance forums are established and mandates are defined. Taken together, these structures describe where decisions are supposed to happen and who has the authority to make them.

Every organisation also has another decision structure: the one that exists in practice.

The two will never correspond perfectly, nor should we necessarily expect them to. Organisations are human systems, and influence does not follow an organisational chart with mechanical precision. Experience matters. Relationships matter. Some people possess knowledge or judgement that gives their opinion greater weight than their formal position might suggest. Good leaders seek perspectives beyond the people who officially own a decision, and many of the most useful conversations in an organisation happen outside scheduled meetings.

Informality, in other words, is not the problem. It can make an organisation faster, more intelligent and more responsive. The problem begins when the informal structure does not supplement the formal one, but quietly supersedes it.

A decision may officially belong to one person or one forum, while everyone involved understands that its real approval sits somewhere else. A leadership team may debate an issue and reach a conclusion, yet participants know that the conclusion remains provisional until another conversation has taken place. Someone may formally hold a mandate while repeatedly discovering that decisions within that mandate can be reopened elsewhere.

Often none of this is written down. It does not need to be. Organisations are remarkably good at learning how power actually works.

People notice which decisions stick and which do not. They notice whose agreement is sufficient and whose requires subsequent validation. They learn who needs to be consulted even when the governance model says otherwise, and which meeting matters less than the conversation that takes place before or after it. Over time, these observations form an alternative map of the organisation, and people begin navigating according to that map rather than the official one.

At first, the consequences can appear relatively harmless. An extra conversation takes place. Someone checks informally with a stakeholder before committing. A decision takes a little longer than expected. Capable people compensate for the ambiguity and learn how to work the system. The more significant effect emerges later, when people begin changing what they bring into the formal decision-making process.

If experience teaches you that a room does not actually have the authority it appears to have, there is little reason to bring the hardest questions into that room. You may still attend the meeting, contribute to the discussion and participate in the formal process, but the consequential work begins to migrate elsewhere. Positions are tested in advance. Decisions are negotiated bilaterally. Difficult issues are withheld until the people with real influence have been consulted. Eventually, the meeting can continue to look like a decision-making forum long after it has stopped functioning as one.

This is where a structural problem becomes a problem of trust. When people stop trusting the decision system, they do not necessarily challenge it openly. More often, they adapt to it. That adaptation is rational. If the formal route repeatedly produces decisions that are subsequently changed, circumvented or reopened, people will naturally begin using the route that appears more likely to produce a durable outcome.

The organisation can therefore develop an increasingly elaborate shadow system of pre-meetings, alignments, private conversations and informal approvals. Each individual action may make sense. Collectively, however, they create friction. Decisions take longer because the apparent process is no longer the complete process. Information becomes unevenly distributed because some of the most consequential conversations occur outside the forums designed to hold them. Accountability becomes harder to locate because the person formally responsible for a decision may not have been the person who ultimately determined it.

The result is not simply slower decision-making. It is a gradual separation between where accountability sits and where influence is exercised.

This distinction matters because decision rights are not merely an organisational design question. They shape behaviour. If people believe that the authority attached to their role is real, they can act within it, seek the perspectives they need and accept responsibility for the consequences. If they believe that authority is conditional on an unofficial approval they cannot clearly see, rational behaviour changes. People become more cautious. They escalate more. They seek protection through alignment. Decisions that could have been made close to the problem move upwards or sideways in search of legitimacy.

What can look like a lack of decisiveness may therefore be a perfectly logical response to the conditions the organisation has created. This is also why simply telling people to “take more ownership” rarely solves the problem. Ownership cannot be demanded independently of the system in which it is supposed to exist. If someone repeatedly experiences that exercising their mandate results in decisions being reopened elsewhere, greater caution is not necessarily evidence of weak leadership. It may be evidence that they have correctly understood how the organisation works.

The same applies to empowerment. An organisation can describe itself as empowered while simultaneously teaching people, through repeated experience, that consequential decisions require approval beyond their stated authority. In that environment, the language of empowerment matters considerably less than what happens the first few times someone actually exercises it. People learn from the system, not from the slide describing the system.

None of this means that decisions, once made, should become untouchable. New information can emerge. Circumstances can change. Good governance sometimes requires intervention, and senior leaders retain responsibilities that cannot simply be delegated away. A healthy decision system must allow decisions to be challenged and, when necessary, changed. The important question is whether the mechanism for doing so is understood.

There is a significant difference between a decision being reconsidered through a legitimate governance process and a decision being informally overridden by someone whose authority over it has never been made explicit. The first can strengthen trust even when the original decision is reversed, because the organisation understands what happened and why. The second weakens trust because it introduces uncertainty about where authority actually resides.

Clarity therefore does not require eliminating informal influence. That would be both impossible and undesirable. It requires sufficient coherence between the formal and real decision structures that people can understand where a decision belongs, whose perspectives should inform it, who ultimately decides and under what circumstances that decision can legitimately be reopened.

When those conditions exist, disagreement becomes easier rather than harder. People can challenge a decision vigorously because challenge does not automatically create uncertainty about who owns it. Consultation can be broad without turning into consensus by default. Senior leaders can contribute without every contribution being interpreted as an instruction. The organisation can benefit from distributed intelligence while retaining clarity of accountability.

When those conditions do not exist, the opposite happens. People spend increasing amounts of energy interpreting signals, anticipating interventions and working out which version of the organisation they are operating within. The formal structure continues to exist, but the real structure increasingly determines behaviour.

This is why organisational speed cannot be understood simply by looking at processes, meeting frequency or the number of approval stages on a diagram. A process may appear efficient on paper while decisions move slowly because the real path they have to travel is considerably longer. Decisions move at the speed of where they actually happen.

The useful leadership question, therefore, is not only whether the organisation has clearly defined decision rights. Most organisations do. It is whether those rights describe reality closely enough that people are willing to trust them.

One way of discovering the answer is surprisingly simple. Look at an important decision and trace what actually happened. Where was the issue first discussed? Where was the substantive debate? Who shaped the available choices? In which room was the apparent decision made? What happened afterwards? Could somebody who was not formally part of that decision reopen it? And, perhaps most revealingly, where did the people involved believe they needed to go before they were confident that the decision was real?

The distance between those answers and the organisation's formal structure tells you something important about the conditions under which people are being asked to lead. Because the question is not ultimately where the organisational chart says decisions happen. It is where people have learned that they actually do.