The field just named the Authority vertex

HBR says decision-rights tools keep failing. Here is the part the tools can’t see.

A new article in Harvard Business Review landed in my inbox this week, and it described a problem I have been mapping for months. The piece, by Lindy Greer and Maxim Sytch of Michigan Ross and Jennifer Jordan of IMD, asks why decision-rights tools keep failing. RACI, RAPID, DARE, take your pick. The honest answer they give is that the tools get misunderstood, misused, and disconnected from how people actually behave.

One detail stopped me. They polled thirty partners at a firm that had run RACI for years and asked a simple question: which role has the final say. Half said the accountable person. Half said the responsible person. Same tool, same training, same room, two different answers about who decides.

They are right about the symptom. I want to add the part underneath it.

A RACI chart is a record of intent. It says who should provide input, who should decide, who should carry it out. What it cannot do is measure whether the authority it assigns actually holds when the room gets hot. That is a structural condition, and structural conditions do not show up in a spreadsheet. They show up in behavior, in delay, in the quiet renegotiation of who really decides.

This is the Authority vertex of the Coherence Triangle, the part of an organization that determines whether a decision, once made, stays made. When the chart says one thing and the behavior says another, you are looking at FM-03, Responsibility Without Authority: people are handed the job to deliver without the standing to decide. Its close cousin is FM-08, Decision Latency, where the decision is technically owned and still takes a month, because nobody is sure the owner can hold the call.

Here is what I keep coming back to, and it is the whole reason I build this way. When a decision keeps stalling, organizations name a person. Someone is indecisive. Someone overstepped. That naming is almost always wrong and always expensive. The chart did not fail because someone was careless. It failed because no structure made the authority real. Naming the person ends the conversation. Naming the structure starts a better one.

So the fix lives one layer down: in the conditions the chart cannot see, and in deciding what to change once they are visible. No blame, just physics.

That is what is on the bench right now. A diagnostic that measures Truth, Authority, and Continuity as structural conditions, scored and reproducible, so a leadership team can see where authority is assigned on paper and absent in practice. The taxonomy is public. The seventeen failure modes are named and testable. The judgment to score a real organization against them is the work.

If you want to feel this from your own chair before any of that, the role lenses at dripractice.com are free. Pick the one that matches your seat and it will show you the five failure modes that tend to hit hardest from there, in about ninety seconds. The HBR piece is the diagnosis of why the tools fail. The lens is what it feels like from the inside.

The door is up. This is the work.

JG