What Companies Get Wrong About Decision Rights – Executive Summary
Harvard Business Review, by Lindy Greer, Jennifer Jordan and Maxim Sytch, published July 2026
1. Summary
"What Companies Get Wrong About Decision Rights" (HBR, 2026) argues that tools like RACI rarely fail on paper, but they fail in how teams apply them. The evidence comes from research plus work with more than 100 companies. Most leadership teams will recognize twelve executives debating whether to add a chief innovation officer, and after 90 minutes of argument the meeting ends without a decision. This is traced to four mistakes: setting decision roles before the goal is clear, treating decision rights as a static list drawn up by a single senior leader, misunderstanding what each role means in practice, and letting hierarchy override the roles that were assigned. The fix sits in the conversation around it. Roles should be co-created with the people who make and live with the decisions, each role should be defined as concrete behavior rather than a label, assignments should be revisited as the work changes, and the whole thing should stay a running discussion. Used that way, these tools cut conflict, improve collaboration, and raise the quality and speed of decisions.
2. Relevance for CIOs
Few functions carry more shared decision surface than IT. Architecture boards, demand committees and portfolio gates are often staffed before anyone agrees what the decision is meant to achieve, so the group optimizes for consensus instead of outcome. Decision matrices written once at program start age badly against a portfolio that reprioritizes quarterly, and labels such as "consulted" invite endless input loops when the expected behavior is left undefined. Hierarchy does the rest: when the CIO is in the room, the named owner tends to stop deciding. For CIOs the practical move is to name one accountable person per decision and to treat the decision model as a living artifact.
3. Thoughts from Sonny Claussen (CEO Bee360) about this Article
Sonny Claussen came back to this topic through a line a friend told him: Americans fall forward, Germans fall backward. After a year in the US and five weeks back at the German headquarters, he saw discussions he once read as thorough differently, with energy going into the last details of alignment long after the decision itself was ready. One example was a decision one person could have made in a day that sat for two weeks, because it belonged to a group and nobody had to move first. The response was to cut alignment meetings, name accountability before involvement, and reduce handovers with clients, which is where the values Responsibility and Efficiency with Focus meet.