Where Your Decisions Actually Get Made

I was in a planning review a few years ago where four of us decided to consolidate two services into one. One of us—a staff engineer who knew both systems from the inside—raised an objection. The rest of us rolled it into a footnote and moved on.

Eight weeks into the work, we unwound it. The objection turned out to be the load-bearing constraint. We had treated it as a detail; he had treated it as a wall.

This isn’t a war story. It’s the ordinary operation of most engineering organizations, including the ones I’ve helped lead. Decisions are made by people who don’t have the information: sometimes because the information holder isn’t in the room, sometimes because they are but their voice doesn’t carry the weight the decision actually requires. The ground truth catches up afterward, usually as the explanation for why the decision didn’t work.

The Information-Authority Gap

Engineering org charts were designed for accountability flow, not information flow. The two don’t match, and as organizations scale, the gap widens.

The pattern is consistent. A senior engineer who’s worked on a service for three years knows things no director can know: the production quirks, the dependencies that aren’t documented, the customer-specific behavior nobody ever wrote down. The director has authority over decisions about that service. Information travels up through standups, Jira roll-ups, weekly summaries, and occasional skip-levels. Each hop is a copy-with-loss step. By the time the decision comes back down, it has the shape of correctness without the substance.

Most engineering leaders feel this gap. Few of them have a vocabulary for it. The default explanation is “we have a culture problem” or “we need to empower the team more.” Both diagnoses are downstream of something more structural.

It’s Not an Empowerment Problem

It’s two structural problems that have to be solved together.

Decision-rights allocation. Authority needs to rest with those who have the relevant knowledge.

Aligned control. Those same people need incentives pointed at the broader organization’s outcomes.

Solve only one, and you create new failure modes. Pure decentralization without alignment produces local optimization that hurts the whole. The senior engineer spends a sprint on the elegant refactor without seeing the delivery commitment it blocks. The team ships what makes on-call easier instead of what the customer needs. Pure centralization without information produces fast, confident, wrong decisions. That second pattern is where most engineering orgs are actually stuck.

The fix isn’t more empowerment talk in the next all-hands. For each significant decision, ask where the relevant knowledge lives and whether that’s also where the authority sits. When the two map cleanly, decisions get faster and better at the same time. When they don’t, you get the consolidation-room scene above, on repeat, in a hundred small variations.

The Visible Signatures

In engineering orgs, the gap leaves fingerprints:

• Architectural decisions made by leaders who haven’t read the on-call runbook.

• Vendor selections made by people who haven’t tested the vendor.

• Priority calls made from dashboards instead of from the teams running the systems.

• Scoping decisions made by managers two levels removed from anyone who’d implement them.

• Migration plans approved by reviewers who haven’t touched the legacy system in eighteen months.

None of these are pathologies in isolation. The pathology lies in treating them as exceptions instead of patterns. Once you start looking, the pattern is everywhere.

What Turn the Ship Around Actually Solved

David Marquet’s book gets quoted for its slogan: “I intend to…” That’s not the point. The mechanism is.

The protocol does both jobs at once. The decision moves to where the knowledge lives—the officer states what they intend to do. Authority stays clear—the captain retains override. Accountability stays clear—the officer who proposed the action owns the outcome. It’s a structural delegation pattern with built-in reversibility and clear lines of accountability.

Most leaders cite the spirit and skip the mechanism. The spirit is easier to cite and harder to install. The mechanism is the opposite—a specific protocol you can run in Tuesday morning’s architectural review. Stop accepting requests for permission. Start expecting statements of intent with the relevant context attached. The captain doesn’t ask the bridge officer for sonar contacts; the bridge officer brings them with the proposed action.

The Audit

A diagnostic to take into your next leadership meeting:

Pick three significant decisions your organization made last quarter. For each, ask where the relevant knowledge lived. Then ask where the decision was actually made. Measure the organizational distance: reporting layers, time zones, whatever currency makes sense in your org.

If the gap is consistently large, you don’t have an empowerment problem. You have a decision-rights allocation problem. It’s costing you in rework, in rollback cycles, and in the senior engineers who stopped fighting and started updating their LinkedIn profiles.

Closing the gap means moving authority toward the knowledge—and ensuring the people now holding it are pulling for the whole organization, not just their patch. Decision-rights allocation without aligned incentives merely relocates the dysfunction.

Your organization is already allocating decision rights. The question is whether you’ve allocated them deliberately or just inherited the allocation from the org chart.

You don’t have a decision problem. You have a placement problem.