The Decision Rights Clarity Map
Your board and management keep disagreeing about what reaches the board: build one shared map of who decides what.
Scope. 5-page guide with a 90-minute facilitation plan, and a working template (decision map and grey zone register). Governance toolkit: practitioner-designed, for use in your context.
The CEO feels the board is micromanaging. The board feels the CEO keeps it in the dark. Both are right. The delegation framework was written at incorporation and sorts decisions by financial threshold alone, so a technology partnership, a product exit and a new approach to a key regulator all reach the board after the fact. The board compensates by asking more questions about smaller decisions, and the friction grows.
Who decides what, and how
A one-page framework that makes explicit what most boards leave implicit: who decides what, and how. The map organises every significant governance decision into four categories — board approval required, board consultation required, delegated with reporting, and fully delegated — and for each decision records who initiates, who is consulted, who approves, and who is informed.
Categories 1 and 4 are usually clear. The real governance work is in Categories 2 and 3, where the line between "the board should be consulted" and "management should just get on with it" causes most of the friction. The map's value lies in the conversation that building it forces the board and management to have.
Use it by building the map with your board in one 90-minute session, then revisiting it when a new Chair or CEO arrives, after a crisis or an acquisition, and at any strategic shift.
Four categories, one map
- The four board decision categories, each with its definition, the board's role, worked examples and the common failure to watch for
- A 90-minute facilitation plan for building the map with the board, with pre-work to send two weeks ahead
- Context variations for listed, private-equity-backed and founder-led boards
- A worked case study of a board that mapped its decision rights
- A working template: the Clarity Map, with a category drop-down and worked examples, and a Grey Zone Register for the decisions where the board and management disagree
Before the next board cycle
Built for boards where the line keeps moving
Written for the Chair who wants board time spent on the decisions that need it. It also serves directors who sense the board is micromanaging, or hearing about strategic decisions too late, and the CEOs and company secretaries who want a clear, shared agreement on what reaches the board.
A shared view of who decides
The board shares one view of who initiates, who is consulted, who approves and who is informed for every significant decision. Strategic decisions that slipped under financial thresholds reach the agenda, operational ones leave it, and the grey zones where directors and management disagree have been talked through and settled.
A practitioner-designed toolkit to be applied in your own context.
The Decision Rights Clarity Map
Catalogue No. 01 · €49 · Digital delivery