An org chart is a map of reporting lines. It tells you who reports to whom. It does not tell you who decides what, who needs to be consulted before a decision is made, or what happens when two people with equal authority disagree. That gap is where most operating model redesigns fail.
What decision rights actually are ¶
Decision rights are explicit assignments of authority. For any significant decision in an organisation, they answer four questions: who owns the decision, who must be consulted before it is made, who must be informed after it is made, and what the escalation path is if the decision owner cannot resolve it. Without explicit answers to those four questions, people default to the patterns they know, regardless of what the new org chart says.
Why they are usually missing ¶
Decision rights are unglamorous to document. They require the leadership team to have direct, sometimes uncomfortable conversations about who actually has authority over what. In organisations where authority has historically been concentrated at the top, those conversations can surface real disagreements about how much autonomy the new structure is actually intended to give. It is easier to redraw the org chart and hope the rest follows.
How to build a decision-rights register ¶
We build a decision-rights register in two working sessions with the leadership team. The first session identifies the twenty to thirty decisions that matter most to the organisation's day-to-day functioning. The second session assigns ownership, consultation requirements, and escalation paths to each one. The output is a table, not a diagram. Plain language, four columns, one row per decision. It takes about three months of active use before it becomes habit.
What changes when you have one ¶
The most immediate change is that escalations drop. When people know who owns a decision and what information is required before it can be made, they stop routing decisions upward by default. The second change is that accountability becomes clearer. When a decision goes wrong, it is possible to understand why: was it the wrong decision, or was it made without the right information, or was it made by the wrong person? Those are different problems with different solutions.
If your organisation has recently gone through a restructure and the old patterns are reasserting themselves, a decision-rights register is usually the most direct intervention. We are glad to talk through whether that is the right starting point for your situation.