Most organisational friction is not disagreement about what the right answer is. It is unresolved disagreement about who gets to decide, dressed up as disagreement about the answer.
That is why the same argument recurs, why decisions get made twice, and why things take four weeks that should take a day.
For an applied reference, see Monitask’s Chinese overtime calculations overview.
The symptoms
You have a decision rights problem, rather than a strategy problem, if you recognise these:
Decisions get remade. Something is settled, and reappears three weeks later because someone who was not consulted has now heard about it.
Meetings expand. Attendance grows because nobody is sure whose agreement is required, so everyone is invited defensively.
Escalation is the default. Anything mildly contested goes up, because nobody at the level below is certain they are allowed to settle it.
"Alignment" becomes a stage. A separate round of work whose purpose is discovering who objects.
The same argument recurs quarterly. It has never been decided; it has only been paused.
Nobody can say who decided. Ask about a real decision and you get "we agreed," which usually means somebody stopped objecting.
Why it stays unwritten
Not because nobody thought of it. Because writing it down requires saying out loud that some people do not get to decide some things.
It makes hierarchy explicit. Organisations that prefer to describe themselves as flat find this uncomfortable, and the discomfort is the whole reason the ambiguity persists.
It removes optionality from senior people. Undefined decision rights mean a senior person can intervene in anything. Defining them means giving that up in writing.
It exposes overlap. Two people currently believe they own the same thing. Writing it down means telling one of them they do not.
Consensus culture treats it as a value. In an organisation that prizes agreement, naming a decider reads as an insult to everyone else.
Every one of these is a real cost of clarity, and all of them are smaller than the cost of ambiguity.
What to make explicit
For each recurring decision type, four things:
Who decides. One person. Not a committee, not "the team." A committee can advise; a committee cannot be accountable.
Who must be consulted. People whose input is required before the decision. Their input is required; their agreement is not.
Who must be informed. People who need to know afterwards. They do not need to be in the room, and this is where most meeting bloat comes from.
What triggers escalation. The threshold above which it is not this person's call. Money, risk, reversibility, or scope — stated concretely.
The frameworks for this are numerous and mostly equivalent. Which one you use matters far less than doing it at all.
The distinction that does the work
Consulted is not the same as agreeing.
The single most useful clarification available, and the one that resolves most of the friction.
A person who is consulted has a right to be heard and to have their view considered. They do not have a veto. Where organisations blur this, every decision requires unanimity, and unanimity means the most risk-averse person in the room decides everything by default.
Saying this explicitly is uncomfortable once and saves the same argument indefinitely.
Reversibility should set the threshold
Not all decisions deserve the same process, and the useful axis is how hard it is to undo.
Easily reversed. Decide fast, at the lowest level, alone. The cost of being wrong is small, and the cost of a careful process exceeds it.
Expensive to reverse. Slower, consulted, documented, higher up.
Most organisations run one process for both, and it is usually calibrated to the expensive case. The result is that trivial decisions take weeks and consequential ones get the same amount of scrutiny as a font choice.
Ask of any decision: if this is wrong, what does it cost to change? The answer should determine the process.
Writing it down
Start with the arguments you keep having. Not with a comprehensive map. List the five decisions that recur and resolve those.
One page. Decision type, decider, consulted, informed, escalation trigger.
Name people, not roles, at least initially. Roles let everyone assume it is somebody else.
Publish it. The value is in it being known, not in it existing.
Revisit when it fails. A decision that got remade is a signal that the map is wrong somewhere.
What to expect when you do it
Somebody will be unhappy. Usually the person who currently has informal veto power and is about to lose it. This is the cost, and it is worth paying.
It will feel bureaucratic for about a month, and then it will feel like less bureaucracy than what preceded it, because the alternative was an undocumented process everyone had to navigate by instinct.
It will surface a real disagreement you have been avoiding. That is a feature. The disagreement existed; it was just costing you a meeting a week instead of one difficult conversation.
The test
Take a real decision made in the last month and ask three people who made it.
If you get three different answers — or if the honest answer is that nobody made it and it emerged — you have found where the next month of friction is going to come from.
For broader public guidance and background, consult the OECD.