The decisions that matter are few
In any company there are between fifteen and thirty decisions that explain most of the outcome: price and exception approvals, investment, product launches, hiring for critical roles, project prioritization. Organizational design must start by listing them and asking who decides, who provides input, and who just needs to be informed.
Symptoms of poorly assigned rights
When assignment fails, the symptoms are recognizable and measurable.
- Decisions escalating two or more levels above where the information sits
- Committees whose main input is rebuilding context, not deciding
- Exceptions approved out of habit and without a record
- Areas held accountable for a result they don't control
Pushing a decision down requires pushing information down
Delegating without visibility generates errors; the decision then goes back up and delegation is cancelled. Every decision pushed down a level needs the data, the authorization corridor, and the associated consequence. That package — not the org chart — is what makes the new structure work.
Key takeaways
- List the critical decisions before redesigning reporting lines.
- A decision right without information or an authorization corridor reverts to the previous level.
- The committee should decide, not reconstruct context.
NS frameworks and reference sources
- Proprietary NS framework · S2S·NS — methodological notes from the Organizational Design practice
- NS project base: anonymized cases by sector and geography
- Open market evidence and academic literature, recalibrated with client data
- Bain & Company — Spans and Layers benchmarks
- McKinsey — Organizational Health Index
- Deloitte — Global Human Capital Trends
This article develops proprietary NS Business Strategy frameworks, drawing on our project base and on public industry literature and studies cited above. Figures are reference ranges; each project is measured against the client's actual data.