Assessments · Governance
Which decisions
nobody owns.
Eleven questions about where decisions get made in your organisation, who holds them afterwards, and what happens when somebody disagrees.
Run it if the same question keeps coming back to the same meeting.
Eleven questions on decision rights: what gets decided where, who holds each decision once it is made, what authority comes with it, and what happens when somebody declines to act. Returns the point at which your decisions stop being decisions and start being discussions again — with your own answers quoted back so you can disagree with the reasoning.
What it is looking for
Agreement is not ownership.
Most organisations have plenty of the first and very little of the second.
A decision gets made in a room. Everyone nods. Nothing in that moment establishes who may act without asking again, what they may spend, or what would make the decision wrong.
So the first person to hit friction has nowhere to take it except back to the room. And the room, being a room, discusses it again.
This assessment looks for the gap between the two. Not whether you have a governance framework — most organisations do — but whether a specific decision has a specific person attached to it.
The answers that matter most are the ones people give quickly and without discomfort. "It depends on the case" is the commonest, and it is the finding.
What this costs when it is missing: the elapsed quarter, and the people who stop raising things because raising them starts a meeting rather than resolving anything.
Two ways to run it
Free, or read by a person.
Same eleven questions either way. What changes is who reads the answers.
Free
Result immediately
Automated
A rule set reads your answers and returns a written finding. Nobody looks at it, and the report says so on every page.
- Where the work stops, on five named stages
- Your own answers quoted back
- Next steps, in the order they should happen
- What the diagnostic cannot tell you
Five working days · includes a call
Reviewed
Somebody reads your answers against how decisions actually work in organisations your size and shape, rewrites the finding for your situation, and talks it through.
- The finding rewritten rather than generated
- Read against comparable operations in your sector
- A thirty-minute call on what it means for you
- The questions the form could not ask, asked
And a third thing, which is not an assessment. A diagnostic engagement does not read your answers at all — it reads your operation, through interviews and your own records. The free assessment responds to what you told us. The reviewed one responds to what we found.
What comes back
The point at which decisions stop holding.
On screen immediately, in full, before anything is asked of you.
Where ownership breaks
Which of five stages your decisions reach — discussed, agreed, owned, authorised, recorded — and where they stop.
Your own answers, quoted
Especially the two or three that produced the finding, so you can see the reasoning and dispute it if it is wrong.
The decision you named, examined
The one that came back. What its return says about the others.
What to do next, in order
Usually shorter than expected. Naming an owner is days of work, and most of what follows depends on it.
Not: a governance framework
You may already have one. Frameworks describe how decisions should be made; this looks at whether a particular decision has a particular name against it.
Worth saying
The answer may be that nobody currently has the authority.
That finding is common, uncomfortable, and the whole value of running this — because it is the thing that cannot be fixed by a process, only by a decision.
If you would rather not know, this is not time well spent, and we would rather say so now.
Frequently asked
Answers before you start.
Who should complete it?
Somebody senior enough to know how decisions actually get made rather than how the org chart says they do. Those are frequently different, and the gap is often the finding.
Can several of us do it separately?
Yes, and it is worth doing. Where two people give different answers about who owns a decision, that disagreement is more informative than either answer.
Do I have to give an email address?
Not to see the result. The finding appears on screen in full, and an email is only needed if you want a copy sent to you.
Is this about compliance governance?
No. It is about operating decisions — who may act, on what, without asking. Compliance frameworks can be complete while this is entirely absent.
What if we already have a RACI?
Then you have the document. This asks whether the last difficult decision actually followed it, which is a different question and usually a shorter conversation.
What does the reviewed version add?
A person reading your answers against how decisions work in organisations your shape, a finding rewritten for your situation, and a call. If the free result already named the problem, it adds nothing.
Name a decision that came back.
That is the first question, and for most organisations one arrives immediately. No email needed to see the result.