You gave the regional directors broader mandates. You elevated the account leads. You cleaned up the chart so decision ownership was finally unambiguous.
Six months on, the same two people at the top are making the same calls.
The authority moved.
The exposure and consequence did not.
The account lead has the title and the band to price within – but the band is drawn so tightly that any real trade-off still goes up. The regional director owns the mandate, but when qualification goes wrong, the cost still lands in the quarterly review, where leadership absorbs it.
So the decision migrates, quietly, back to the people who actually live with its effects.
And those people still sit at the top.
This is the trap in many reorganisations. They redistribute authority and assume judgement follows.
It does not.
Judgement follows exposure – it forms in the person who feels the result, not the person who holds the box on the chart. Move authority but leave exposure behind, and you create a role that looks empowered on paper and decides nothing in practice.
It runs the other way too. Give someone real exposure to customer consequence but no authority to act on it, and you have not empowered them.
You have trapped them.
They see what needs deciding and have to escalate to get it done. The system calls that a process. The person experiences it as being held responsible for outcomes they were never allowed to shape.
Authority tends to settle where it is comfortable – with seniority, history, and whoever is used to holding it. But it needs to sit where the consequence lands. When those two places are not the same, no amount of redrawing the chart will move the decision.
Because the decision follows the exposure, not the lines.
In your organisation, do the people closest to customer consequence have the authority their exposure demands – or does authority sit where it is comfortable rather than where it is needed?
This question closes a chapter of The Architecture of Commercial Performance, where the thinking behind it is developed in full.
