Not Deciding Is A Decision
Sometimes I think my entire job is just saying the thing out loud.
I watched a leadership team spend twenty minutes debating whether a poster should hang here, or three feet to the left of “here.” There were opinions and even a hand-drawn diagram that looked way more scientific than the conversation warranted. And then someone said, “Okay,” and they moved on to a question about uniforms, as if something had just been settled.
Nothing had been settled. That’s twenty minutes nobody in that room is getting back.
So I said so. “I want to circle back to the poster: where it’s going, who’s responsible, and by when.” You’d think I made a unicorn appear out of thin air. People looked relieved. Some even looked impressed. A few were mildly annoyed, like I’d broken an unspoken agreement to let the thing die quietly, the way it was supposed to.
I call what happened with the poster “throw the ball up in the air and hope somebody catches it.” Spoiler: usually no one does. A friend of mine in marketing has a cleaner term for the same thing: diffusion of responsibility. Nobody volunteers or gets assigned responsibility, and then the thing just doesn’t happen.
I guarantee you that a week later, someone asks why the poster still isn’t hung. Then a baffled leader says, "Didn't we already talk about this?” And, yes, they technically did. They talked about it at length. But what they didn’t do was establish who actually owned the decision and who was responsible for turning it into action.
Talking about something isn’t the same as deciding something. And deciding something isn’t the same as assigning responsibility for getting it done.
Clarity is kind, people.
Unclaimed, Not Undecided
If you look closely at the poster conversation, it DOES get decided. There may not be a formal owner or clear next steps, but there’s absolutely an outcome. Inertia makes the decision for them, and the likely outcome is that the poster doesn’t get hung.
Rarely do things in leadership teams go undecided. They just go unclaimed.
Since I started working on this topic, I can't get the Rush song, “Freewill,” out of my head. (Yes, I'm a Rush fan. If you're also Gen-X and a fan of those Canadian rock legends, you already know where this is going.) Geddy Lee sings this line: “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.” Translation: letting something go undecided is still a choice (to let it go undecided).
The same is true of execution. Choosing not to name an owner doesn’t leave the work in some neutral, suspended state. You’ve effectively chosen to let assumptions, habit, hierarchy, or whoever finally gets annoyed enough determine what happens next.
Ambiguity Still Produces an Outcome
Years ago I was introduced to an essay “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” It was written in 1970 by a woman named Jo Freeman, and, in addition to having the greatest name of any essay ever written, it’s about the women’s movement’s love for leaderless, structureless groups in the sixties and seventies. She wasn’t writing about your leadership team, but she might as well have been!
Her argument came down to this: there’s no such thing as a structureless group. Every group organizes itself one way or another, whether anyone admits it or not. The only real choice is between two kinds of structures: a formal one that is visible, named, and can be argued with, or an informal one, which runs the show quietly while everyone agrees to pretend nobody’s in charge.
I think the same principle applies to ownership and execution. There’s no such thing as a responsibility vacuum. If you don’t explicitly decide who owns something, your team will still come up with a system for determining what happens: the person who always cleans things up does it,the old way of doing things continues, or nobody does anything until the problem becomes impossible to ignore.
Ambiguity doesn’t prevent an outcome; it just means you have less control over how you arrive at one.
The Collaboration Trap
One of the places I see this most often is with leaders who genuinely think they’re being collaborative. And to be fair, many of them are trying to be.
Version one, they ask for input, they have the open-door thing going, the whole performance. And then they make the decision they were always going to make, regardless of the team’s input. The team figures this out fast, usually faster than the leader does, and they stop bothering to disagree or fight for their point of view. Why spend the energy arguing for a call that was made before the meeting started? And, by the way, this can happen at any level; you see this with a director who has a three-person team all the way up to the CEO.
The problem isn’t necessarily that the leader makes the final call. There are plenty of decisions where that’s exactly what should happen. The problem is that nobody has been explicit about the decision-making structure. “I want your input, and then I’m going to decide” is very different from allowing five people to believe they’re making a group decision when one person has held the deciding vote all along.
I also like the quote, “Everyone gets a voice, not a vote.” Meaning that while team members and stakeholders should share their input, ideas, and feedback openly, a single designated person holds the final decision-making authority. And that's okay, if it’s been made clear!
Version two is subtler, and the harder one to work with. The leader actually does take the input and implements suggestions. They hand over the wheel, right up until something goes wrong, and at that point it becomes, “Well, I did what you all wanted.” Same ending as version one, different road getting there. The team stops sharing what they actually think, either because it’ll be ignored anyway or because it might get used against them later if things go sideways. Either way, the leader ends up making the call in isolation and can’t figure out why nobody seems engaged anymore.
What both versions have in common is fuzzy ownership. Who actually made the decision? Who owns the consequences of it? Who is responsible for what happens next?
Collaboration doesn’t require everyone to have equal decision authority, and delegation doesn’t require the leader to disappear, but it does require everyone to understand the terms.
Three Questions
You could add another meeting. A survey, maybe, or a follow-up email with an action-items table nobody fills out. You can “circle back” next Tuesday, and the Tuesday after that. I’ve watched teams try all of it, and what happens? Nothing. Because more processes stacked on top of an unnamed structure just give that structure more places to hide.
The fix is smaller than that, and also somehow harder. Ask, out loud, three plain questions:
Who's actually deciding this?
Who’s responsible for executing on it?
And by when?
Nobody asks these questions nearly as often as you’d think given how simple they are. I think it’s because the answers are sometimes uncomfortable. Naming who holds power means admitting somebody holds it unevenly.
And naming who owns the execution creates a different kind of discomfort: now there’s a person attached to the outcome. Add a date, and eventually everyone will be able to tell whether it happened.
Naming doesn’t create the structure or the accountability. It makes both visible. Once they’re visible, you can actually manage them: delegate differently, renegotiate a deadline, push back on a decision, ask for help, or identify what’s blocking the work.
Clarity Creates Accountability
This is the piece of the conversation I think gets missed most often: you can’t meaningfully hold someone accountable for something they never clearly owned. Read my other newsletter about this; I have lots of opinions on the matter. :)
If five people leave a meeting believing that “we” are going to take care of something, what exactly happens when it doesn’t get done? When I hear, “Yes, we should do that,” I know that, in fact, no one is doing it.
Without an owner, the only accountability conversation available to you is, “Why didn’t anybody do this?”
With an owner, you get to ask a much more useful question: “What’s blocking this?”
That’s a small change in language, but a huge change in management. The first question is about generalized failure. The second gives you an actual problem to solve. Maybe the owner didn’t have the authority they needed. Maybe another priority took precedence. Maybe they misunderstood the deadline. Maybe they dropped the ball. All of those require different responses, and you can’t get to any of them until somebody actually owns the thing.
It’s worth repeating: clarity is kind, people.
For the record, the poster got hung. I asked those three questions, and the path to execution suddenly became abundantly clear. It turned out that the exact location mattered less than making sure someone actually owned the next step. Once assigned, the responsible party was happy to take the lead.
A good chunk of what I do as a consultant, what some have started calling “Fractional Chief of Staff,” is to say the thing that everyone half-knows and nobody’s willing to say out loud, including, sometimes, the founder or the CEO. It’s one of my favorite parts of the job.
Whatever’s hanging unclaimed on your team right now (and something is), you don’t technically need a consultant to determine who’s deciding, who’s responsible for what, and by when. You just need someone in the room willing to ask the questions out loud.
And sometimes that’s the real problem: everybody inside the system can see the ambiguity, but hierarchy, history, or habit makes it difficult to name it.
If asking the question out loud is not naturally you, or nobody’s letting it be you, let’s talk!
