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Glossary
Decision rights
Decision rights are the explicit allocation of who may decide what, with what input, and under what escalation rules. They separate authority to choose from accountability for outcomes, consultation rights, and execution responsibility — so consequential choices are not left to informal power or endless consensus.
Why it matters
Unclear decision rights produce either bottlenecked executives or decisions that nobody owns. In AI-augmented enterprises the problem intensifies: agents can propose and act quickly only if humans have predefined rights over goals, ethics, exceptions, and irreversible commitments.
Connect decision rights to the Decision-Making & Execution cluster (how choices are framed and evaluated) and to the Agentic Operating Model (where humans retain rights over intent and exceptions while agents operate inside constraints). Rights design is organizational; decision methods are analytical — both are required.
Example (enterprise): A bank introducing agent-assisted credit operations defines that model-threshold exceptions escalate to a named credit officer, policy changes require risk-committee approval, and front-line teams may approve only within published bands. Cycle time falls because most cases clear under rights already granted — without silent reassignment of accountability.
Mechanisms
- Inventory consequential decision types and classify them by reversibility, risk, and frequency.
- Assign decide / input / perform / accountable roles with escalation paths (including human override of agent action).
- Publish rights in operating cadences and systems so authority is discoverable at the moment of choice.
Boundaries
- Decision rights ≠ RACI paperwork alone; unused matrices do not allocate real authority.
- Authority to decide ≠ accountability for outcomes; both must be named and can sit with different roles when designed deliberately.
- Decision rights ≠ decision quality methods; rights assign who chooses, methods guide how choices are analyzed.
- In an agentic setting, rights are not “humans do everything” — they define which human choices remain non-delegable.
Related topics
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