Ask five people in a well-run organization who decides whether a customer gets a credit above ten thousand dollars, and you will frequently get three answers and two people who assume somebody else handles it.
The map exists regardless of whether anyone wrote it. It was assembled out of habit, precedent, and whoever happened to be in the room the first few times the question arose. Nobody designed it, everybody operates from a slightly different version of it, and the discrepancies surface only under pressure, which is the worst possible moment to discover them.
Three separate rights
Most confusion here comes from treating one bundle as indivisible when it is actually three things that can sit with three different people.
The right to decide is the authority to close the alternatives. The right to be consulted is a claim on being asked before that happens, which is a real entitlement and creates a real obligation. The right to be informed is a claim on being told afterward, which is weaker and is what most people who believe they hold consultation rights actually hold.
Nearly every complaint that a decision was made improperly turns out, on inspection, to be a dispute about which of these three somebody held. The person is not usually claiming they should have decided. They are saying they should have been asked, and nobody had ever established whether they should.
The default drifts upward
Left alone, decision rights migrate up the organization, and the migration is driven by ordinary reasonable behaviour rather than by anyone grasping for control.
A manager faces a call they could make. Making it carries some risk of being wrong and being seen to be wrong. Asking their superior costs an email and transfers the exposure entirely. Multiply that by every manager and every ambiguous case, and within a few years a senior team is spending its time on decisions that three layers of the organization were competent to make, while the actual work of the senior team goes unattended.
The upward drift is not a discipline problem and cannot be solved by telling people to take more ownership. It is a rational response to an ambiguity, and the only fix is to remove the ambiguity by writing the boundary down.
Where a right should sit
Two considerations govern, and they pull in opposite directions.
Push the right toward the information. The person closest to the customer, the machine, or the site knows things that do not survive summarisation, and a decision made two levels above them is made on a compressed and partly fictional account of the situation.
Pull the right toward whoever bears the consequence. A decision that sets precedent, spends reputation, or binds the organization for years belongs with somebody who will still be there and answerable when it matures.
Where these conflict, reversibility settles it. If the thing can be undone within a quarter at a bearable cost, give it to the information. If it cannot, give it to the consequence, and accept that the decision will be made on a worse picture of the facts because the alternative is worse still.
Thresholds are the practical instrument
The workable form of all this is a small set of numbers, and small is the operative word.
Credits below a figure are settled by the account manager without asking. Between that figure and a second one, the branch manager decides and informs. Above the second, it comes to the executive team. Three lines, no committee, and every ambiguous case in the organization now has an answer that took four minutes to establish.
What defeats this is elaboration. An organization that produces a fourteen-page authority matrix has built something nobody will read and everybody will work around, and the informal map will reassert itself within a quarter. The version that survives fits on one page and covers perhaps a dozen recurring decisions, which is nearly always enough, because the same handful of ambiguities generate most of the friction.
The obligation that comes with the right
Granting a decision right and then routinely overriding it is worse than never granting it.
The first override teaches everyone that the delegation was nominal. The second confirms it. After that the right formally exists and nobody uses it, decisions route upward exactly as before, and the leader concludes that their people will not step up. What actually happened is that they were shown the real rule and adjusted correctly.
Which means the person who assigns a decision right has accepted a specific discipline: when the holder decides something you would have decided differently, and it is within their boundary and not catastrophic, it stands. You may say afterward what you would have done and why. You do not reverse it. The cost of one suboptimal outcome is nearly always smaller than the cost of teaching an entire organization that authority here is decorative.
Edited by Patrick J. Wolf, PhD