Decisions are an operating system
When decision-making becomes political, the problem is rarely the politics. It is that nobody designed where decisions are made, by whom, and with what.
Group 18 InsightsJuly 28, 20266 min read
Every organization has a decision-making system. In most, it was never designed. It accreted: a founder who decided everything, then a leadership team that decided some things, then a set of meetings where things were discussed but not decided, and finally a culture in which the way to get a decision is to catch the right person in a corridor.
The symptoms are familiar. Meetings that end without an outcome. Decisions that are made, then relitigated. Leaders who are unsure whether they are allowed to decide, so they escalate to be safe, and a founder who is astonished to find themselves the bottleneck on matters they do not care about.
The diagnosis is usually offered as a people problem: this leader is indecisive, that one is territorial. The design view is different. Nobody has written down which decisions belong to which role, which forum makes which class of decision, and what information is required to be in the room.
Designing the system starts with an inventory. For one quarter, log the decisions that reach the leadership team. Classify each by whether it should have been made lower, whether it was made at all, and whether it was made twice. The pattern is the design.
The rebuild has three parts. Decision rights, attached to roles rather than people. Forums, each with a defined class of decision and the artifact it produces. And an escalation path that is short, explicit, and used rarely, because most decisions now have a home.
When the system exists, politics has less to feed on. Not because people became better, but because the question "who decides this" has an answer that does not depend on who asked.