Recommend
Weigh the evidence and propose the preferred option.
A surprising number of decisions become difficult for reasons that have little to do with the decision itself. The evidence may be available and the options understood, yet progress stalls because nobody is quite sure who has the authority to move it forward.
Most teams know who’s involved, but that’s not the same as knowing who can recommend an option, who must be consulted, who approves spending, who makes the final decision, and who’s accountable afterwards.
When those roles are vague, decisions inevitably drift. Meetings become a substitute for authority, the same arguments are repeated with different groups, and issues are escalated because nobody wants to discover later that the “wrong” person made the call.
But fear not: Decision Rights are a practical way to prevent that ambiguity.
What are Decision Rights?
Decision Rights define who has the authority and responsibility to perform specific roles around a decision. They make explicit who can do what, at which point in the process, and where final authority sits.
Crucially, being involved doesn’t automatically mean having authority: someone may provide specialist expertise without owning the recommendation, finance may approve expenditure without deciding whether the proposal is strategically preferable, or a project owner may be responsible for implementation even though someone else has the final decision right.
Being involved in a decision doesn't automatically mean having the final decision right.
Approve
Sign off a specific requirement, such as budget, risk or compliance.
Decide
Hold final authority to choose the option and accept the consequences.
Useful roles can include:
📌 Proposal owner: develops the proposal and keeps it moving.
🔍 Contributor or expert: provides evidence, analysis, or specialist input.
💬 Consulted stakeholder: gives input because the decision affects their area.
🧭 Recommender: weighs the evidence and proposes the preferred option.
✅ Approver: confirms a specific requirement, such as budget, risk, or compliance.
⚖️ Final decision-maker: has the authority to choose the option and accept the consequences.
🛠️ Implementation owner: puts the decision into effect and tracks delivery.
It’s entirely possible for one person to hold more than one role, particularly for smaller decisions. The point isn’t to create as many roles as possible, but to remove ambiguity where the distinction matters.
Why unclear Decision Rights slow organizations down
The most visible symptom is delay, but the underlying problem is usually repeated uncertainty about authority.
Let’s consider a scenario that many will be familiar with: a proposed software purchase. The operational team owns the problem and has evaluated several options, IT has assessed integration, security has reviewed risk, finance has confirmed the budget, and procurement has negotiated the commercial terms. A steering committee then meets to “approve” the purchase.
But what does “approve” actually mean here?
If each department believes that it has a potential veto over the whole decision, the group can just keep reopening issues that have already been settled. If everyone assumes the steering committee owns the decision, senior leaders may spend time deciding something that should sit with a functional executive. If nobody knows whether finance is approving affordability or judging the business need, a budget check can quietly turn into a second evaluation of the proposal.
This is how decisions get made by committee even when no committee was ever given the decision right.
The opposite also happens: teams escalate low-risk, reversible decisions because the authority boundary is unclear, turning senior leaders into a bottleneck for decisions that could safely have been made lower in the organization while genuinely important decisions compete for the same limited time and attention.
Clear Decision Rights reduce both problems. They let the right people contribute without giving every participant equal authority over every aspect of the decision.
How to design Decision Rights that fit the decision
Decision Rights should reflect the decision rather than simply mirror the org chart. A $20,000 operational tool, a $5 million automation program, and a strategic acquisition shouldn’t require the same pattern of authority. Several factors help determine where rights should sit:
📊 Value and exposure: Higher-value commitments usually justify more senior authority, but low-cost decisions can still create significant operational, legal, or reputational exposure.
⚠️ Risk and reversibility: Decisions that are cheap to reverse can usually sit closer to the people with the relevant knowledge. Difficult-to-unwind decisions deserve stronger challenge and clearer senior ownership.
🧠 Expertise: Authority should sit close enough to the evidence for the decision-maker to understand what is being decided.
🏢 Organizational impact: A local team decision may be owned locally, while changes to shared processes or enterprise architecture may need broader authority.
🔍 Conflicts of interest: The person proposing an investment shouldn’t automatically be the only person able to approve it.
The aim is proportionality. Smaller decisions may need only an owner and a decision-maker, while larger decisions may need specialist contributors, formal approvals, and a senior forum. Adding more people for the sake of it rarely improves the result.
Decision Rights, RACI, RAPID and DACI
Frameworks such as RACI, RAPID and DACI can help clarify roles, but they solve slightly different problems, and the labels matter less than the clarity they create:
RACI distinguishes who’s Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed. It’s useful for work and delivery, but responsibility for completing work isn’t necessarily authority to make a decision. Someone can be responsible for preparing analysis without having the right to choose the outcome.
RAPID places more emphasis on decision roles: Recommend, Agree, Perform, Input and Decide.
DACI similarly distinguishes the Driver, Approver, Contributors, and Informed participants.
There’s no need to force every organization into a single framework, as a simple set of explicit roles may be easier to use consistently. What matters is that people can answer the practical questions:
Who develops the recommendation?
Whose input is required?
Which approvals are checks on specific concerns?
Who makes the final call?
Who owns execution afterwards?
If those answers are clear, the organization has captured the useful part of Decision Rights, whether or not it uses a formal framework to describe them.
Decision Rights are part of Decision Governance
Decision Rights and Decision Governance are closely connected, but they aren’t interchangeable.
Decision Rights define who has authority to perform particular roles. Decision Governance is the wider system determining how decisions are prepared, challenged, approved, recorded and tracked.
Decision Rights
Who has authority to do what?
Defines who recommends, contributes, approves, decides and owns implementation.
Decision Governance
How should the decision be managed?
Defines how decisions are prepared, challenged, approved, recorded and tracked.
Governance might determine that a strategic initiative needs quantified benefits, documented risks, named assumptions and an approval package before reaching a steering committee. Decision Rights then determine who prepares the recommendation, who provides input, which functions approve specific requirements, and who has final authority.
That distinction matters after approval too; a decision record should capture who made the decision and on what basis, while ownership should continue into implementation and outcome tracking. Otherwise, an organization can be very clear about who approved an investment, while being surprisingly vague about who’s accountable when the expected benefits fail to appear.
KangaROI makes this explicit within the decision itself. Roles such as owner, sponsor, approver, and requester can be assigned to named people, alongside an authority context field that explains how responsibility and approval actually work for that decision. This keeps the governance visible alongside the evidence, risks, financials, and outcomes, rather than leaving people to reconstruct who had authority from meeting notes or informal conversations.
Consistent Decision Rights also improve portfolio visibility. Leaders can see where approvals are getting stuck, where too many decisions are escalated, and where decisions lose clear ownership after approval.
A practical way to clarify Decision Rights
You don’t need a major governance exercise to improve Decision Rights; just start with the decisions that regularly cause delay, confusion or unnecessary escalation, and for each one, ask:
🧭 Who owns the proposal and moves it forward?
🔍 Who has expertise or evidence that must inform it?
💬 Who must be consulted, and who simply needs to be informed?
📌 Who recommends the preferred option?
✅ Are there separate approvals for budget, risk, security, compliance or procurement?
⚖️ Who has final authority to decide?
🛠️ Who owns implementation and the outcomes afterwards?
📈 Does the level of authority match the value, risk and reversibility of the decision?
Then test the answer against a real case. If two people still believe they have the final say, or everyone assumes the committee decides collectively, the rights aren’t yet clear enough.
The goal isn’t to document every possible interaction; it’s to make authority obvious where ambiguity would otherwise create delay, duplicated debate, or weak accountability.
Better decisions need clear authority
Decision-making becomes easier when participation and authority aren’t treated as the same thing. People can contribute expertise, challenge assumptions, and protect important organizational interests without every participant becoming a co-owner of the final decision.
Clear Decision Rights give teams a practical answer to who recommends, who approves, who decides, and who carries the outcome forward. Combined with proportionate Decision Governance, they create a stronger record of how decisions were made and who remains accountable once the meeting is over.
