Hi {{first_name}}

Most senior leaders will recognise the pattern. Work is underway, capable people are involved, the plan is broadly sound, and yet progress feels slower than it should. Look more closely, and the issue is often not effort or capability. It is that the decision sits in the space between roles, and nobody is fully clear who holds the authority to make the call.

That usually is not because people are unwilling. More often, they have learned that acting without clear backing can create problems later. So they hold back. They wait. And from the outside, what looks like drift is often a sensible response to a system that makes initiative risky when blurred authority exists.

The decision sits there. Momentum drains out of the work. Timescales slip. Then the leader at the centre of it wonders why everything feels slower than it should.

There is good evidence that this matters. In McKinsey’s State of Organizations 2026 report, based on responses from over 10,000 senior executives across 15 countries and 16 industries, one of the clearest messages is that organisations are still struggling to close the gap between strategy and execution. The report also highlights a powerful upside when organisations clarify decision rights and simplify decision processes: they can make decisions faster and waste less time in unproductive meetings.

So yes, the upside of getting this right is real. But the more interesting question is why so many organisations allow decision ownership to stay vague in the first place.

In many organisations, this gets labelled as a structural issue. The governance is too loose; the RACI is out of date; the matrix is confusing, or the approval process has too many layers. Sometimes that is true. But it is rarely the whole story.

In my experience, unclear ownership usually survives because of leadership behaviour. It stays vague because leaders, consciously or not, create the conditions where vagueness feels safer than clarity.

If a leader wants to be consulted on everything, even while saying they have delegated, people learn to wait. If a leader steps in and overturns decisions that were meant to sit lower down, people learn that delegation only goes so far. And if a leader stays intentionally vague about where authority really sits, often because clear boundaries also create clear accountability, people learn very quickly that safety matters more than ownership.

That is why redrawing the structure on its own rarely solves it. If the behaviour underneath does not change, the ambiguity simply grows back.

So perhaps the more useful reframe is this: decision ownership is not mainly an organisation design problem. More often, it is a leadership behaviour problem.

When a leader is clear about where decisions sit, holds that line, and does not pull authority back the moment an outcome feels uncomfortable, the organisation moves differently. People stop second-guessing. Decisions are made closer to the work. Execution speeds up.

That sounds straightforward, but in practice it asks something difficult of many leaders. It means living with outcomes you did not control directly. It means resisting the pull to stay at the centre of everything. And for leaders whose instinct is to control, protect, or remain close to the last call, that is often where the more meaningful work begins.

In the end, organisations rarely move faster than their leaders are prepared to allow.

This week, pick one decision in your team that seems to hang in the air longer than it should.

Then ask yourself two simple questions: Who should own it, and have I made that unmistakably clear?

If the answer to the second question is no, the delay may not be sitting where you think it is.

 Best wishes,

Gavin

Source: McKinsey & Company, The State of Organizations 2026.