By: Kumar Dattatreyan

You ran the decision-rights workshop. Everyone left with a chart. Every important call had an owner, a name in a box, a clean line of accountability. A quarter later you're still waiting on the same decisions. The owner you assigned still forwards every real call to their boss. The team underneath still can't tell you what they're deciding toward.

The workshop missed the part that doesn't fit on a slide. Naming a decider is the easy half. It costs a whiteboard and an hour. Seating one costs power. You've got to hand a real person the authority to decide, pull the approvals off the top of them and give their team a strategy worth deciding toward. Most organizations skip that half and call the chart a transformation. It isn't. It's a label on an empty seat.

Decision rights is a two-part machine

Most change management treats decision rights as a mapping exercise. Draw the RACI, assign an owner, publish the chart. That's part one, naming who decides, and it's cheap because it costs the people in the room nothing. Part two is seating the decider. You give a real person the authority to make the call. You pull the approvals off the top of them. Their team gets a strategy above it, clear enough to decide toward. Part two costs power, which is why it gets skipped.

The organization that names deciders and never seats them pays twice. Once for the workshop. Again for the quarter it loses while decisions still route upward. If you want to know how to make decisions move faster, the honest answer isn't a better chart. It's a transfer of authority the chart can't perform for you.

The approval stack that decides nothing

Alan Zucker ran agile at MCI a decade before anyone wrote the manifesto, and he watched process pile up at Fannie Mae. He ties empowerment straight to decision making. On episode 154 he put it plainly: "a way we show empowerment is through decision-making." Empowerment isn't a poster. It shows up, or fails to, in who actually gets to decide.

Then he described what actually breaks. As a call climbs the chain, "everybody's just signing off based on what the person below them said." The owner you wrote in the box signs. Their manager signs on top of that. The VP signs on top of both. Responsibility diffuses at every layer until no one has actually decided anything. You built a decision-making process that launders accountability instead of assigning it.

Zucker also draws the line that tells you whether a seat is real. "governance means we have mechanisms to have visibility and transparency so we can manage the enterprise. Bureaucracy is about control." A real seat sits inside governance. The organization can see the decision and lives with the outcome. An empty seat sits inside bureaucracy. The approval exists so someone higher stays in control, and the person in the box is boxed. A decider buried in a stack of sign-offs isn't seated. He's decorative.

The word "decision" hides the work

James Taylor built the decision management category, so he's spent two decades watching people talk past each other about a single word. On episode 173 he put it bluntly: "The problem is that everyone knows what decisions mean. They think I mean the decisions they make, and generally I don't."

Carry that across to organizational change and the parallel holds. Leaders run a decision-rights workshop about the boardroom calls and the big strategic bets, then never touch the thousands of small operational decisions where authority actually has to live. The refund at the counter. The scope cut on a Tuesday. The vendor a team can pick without booking a meeting. Those small calls are where change becomes real, and they're the ones no chart maps. You mapped the decisions you already knew about and left the ones that run the business unowned.

Taylor's fix is the one the whole argument needs: "if you're going to want to succeed with these tools, you have to begin with the decision in mind." Define the actual decision before you assign its owner. A box on a chart with no decision behind it amounts to a title, not a right.

Why the seat stays empty

Naming who decides is easy because it costs the person doing the naming nothing. Seating a decider costs whoever holds the call today. That's why the seat stays empty, and it's the part change management keeps getting wrong. Om Patel coaches leaders in finance, law and HR without ever using the word agile. On episode 155 he described how control actually moves: "it's not about stripping control, which they really hold on to with a tight grip. It's not about that. It's about expanding influence through cultivating trust."

You don't seat a decider by ordering a Type A leader to let go. You reframe the ask as more influence rather than less control. You run a small bet where they hand off one decision and let the faster result do the arguing. Then you change the incentive, because Patel's next point is the hinge: "if you don't change incentives, you're asking people to behave against their own interests, which are often quite entrenched and political."

Seating a decider is a political act, not a slide. The transfer costs someone power and rewrites someone's incentive. That's the organizational change work the chart pretends you already did.

The strongest objection, answered

The sharpest reader is already reaching for the opposite case, so I'll put it in its own terms. Founder mode says the premise is backwards. Paul Graham's 2024 essay, built on Brian Chesky's account of rebuilding Airbnb, argues that the usual advice to hire good people and give them room is often how founders get managed into mediocrity. The great ones stay hands-on, skip levels, hold product planning themselves and keep the calls that matter at the center instead of pushing them out. On that view, distributing decisions to the edge is the trap, and one strong central decider beats a chart of empowered owners. The lighter cut comes from the decision-rights-as-bureaucracy critics. A RACI and a decision log are theater. They're more boxes to maintain, and they change who signs off without changing who decides.

Both are worth taking seriously, and neither dents the thesis. Founder mode is decision rights working, not decision rights refuted. A founder in founder mode is the seated decider on the vital few and reachable by skip-level on everything else. That's a clear seat and an open door, not an empty chart. The failure Graham diagnoses, managers who hoard authority and hand back mush, is the empty-seat problem told from the top. And founder mode doesn't scale past the founder. Chesky can't sit in every room, so below the handful of calls he owns, Airbnb still needs people with real authority and a direction sharp enough to decide toward. He didn't remove decision rights. He clarified who decides and gave everyone else a strategy clear enough to act on. That's my argument, coming from the side that's supposed to disagree with it.

The RACI critics are right about the theater and wrong about the cause. A decision log fails for the same reason the workshop fails, because the org wrote the name and never moved the power. The paper isn't the problem. The unmade transfer is.

How to seat a decider

So how do you seat one instead of naming one? Glenn Marshall traced organizational silos on episode 137 to a human instinct. When something goes wrong, we reach for control and wrap process around it. His authority test is the whole thesis in a single question. Do decisions get made by the people closest to the impact? When a rep can't solve a customer's problem without permission, the job exists but the authority doesn't. As Glenn put it: "Your job is to satisfy the customer, but you can't because you have to get permission. That is an authority silo."

His instruction is the seating move stated plainly: "give them the authority and the guidelines. And if there's an issue, train them and guide them in the right direction, but don't put obstacles in the way." Disney's frontline policy is that pattern working. A staffer holds the authority to spend up to a thousand dollars to fix a guest's problem, no permission required, reviewed after the fact. Authority up front, audit behind. That's a seated decider, and it's what real delegation of decision-making authority looks like once you stop confusing it with a title.

One more piece keeps the seat from going empty by accident. A name with no criteria is still an empty seat. If the person in the box can't tell what a good decision looks like, they'll route the call upward for cover every time. Seating a decider means handing over the decision itself and the authority to make it, along with the criteria the decision runs on. Give them line of sight to what the organization is trying to do, and the call gets made without a trip up the chain.

The discipline runs the other way

Most change efforts do the labeling, skip the transfer, then blame resistance when nothing moves. Run it the other way. Define the actual decision before anyone owns it, so the owner inherits a real call and not a vague mandate. Hand that call to the person closest to the impact and give them the criteria to decide by. Then take your hands off the approval, so your signature stops being a control point and starts being governance you can see. Do that and the chart finally describes something real. Skip it and you've drawn another organization of empty seats.

Peter Merel and the XSCALE community have a name for the posture this asks of a leader: Leadership as a Service. The idea traces to the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois confederacy, where a leader served the people instead of ruling them. Applied to decision rights, that's the whole job. Your work isn't to hold the calls. It's to seat the people who should hold them, hand over the authority and the criteria, point them at the strategy, then get out of the way and review after the fact. Leadership stops being the bottleneck every decision routes through and becomes the thing that makes other people's decisions possible.

I wrote last year about what Machiavelli teaches about leading organizational change, that change is coalition work, the leader assembling the people who can actually move the organization. This sharpens the mechanism. Coalition building is seating deciders. You don't lead change by announcing who's accountable. You lead it by transferring the authority and the incentive to the people who'll make the calls, then giving them a direction to aim at. The Disruptor Method™, the framework we built at Agile Meridian, puts decision making, line of sight and empowerment of the people closest to the work at the center for exactly this reason. Machiavelli had the politics right. He just didn't spell out the mechanics, and the mechanics are seating deciders.

Naming a decider is the easy half. Seat the other one.

Related Podcast Episodes

Episode 154, "AGILE VS TRADITIONAL? Breaking the False Binary" with Alan Zucker. Alan is the spine of this argument. He ties empowerment directly to decision making and describes how stacked approvals diffuse responsibility until the owner on the chart decides nothing. His split between governance and bureaucracy is the test I use to tell a real seat from a control layer. 

Episode 155, "Agile Without the Jargon: Coaching Executives Beyond IT" with Om Patel. Om explains why the seat stays empty. Type A leaders hold control with a tight grip, so you expand their influence through trust rather than stripping the control by decree. His point about incentives is the reason seating a decider is a political act and not a slide.

Episode 173, "The AI Decisions Are Wrong (And Your Data Isn't the Problem)" with James Taylor. James built the decision management category, and his point about the word "decision" is the one that reframes the whole thing. Leaders picture the big strategic calls and miss the small operational ones where authority has to live. Begin with the decision in mind, then assign the owner.

 Episode 137, "Organizational Silos Are Bleeding Your Revenue" with Glenn Marshall. Glenn supplies the design move. Give people the authority and the guidelines, review after the fact and stop putting obstacles in the way. His authority-silo test, whether the people closest to the impact can actually decide, is the fastest way to find your empty seats. 

Let's talk

If your last transformation produced a chart and not a change, the gap is probably here, between naming deciders and seating them. I help executive teams find the empty seats and move the authority that actually makes decisions move. Book a 30-minute conversation