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by Jeanne Bell and Dan Tucker, Co-Founders
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Blog No. 15 - March 2026
Have you ever been a part of an organizational decision rights exercise? It’s one of those activities that starts to unravel intellectually almost as soon as you begin. First, there is an attempt to name every type of important decision that the organization makes. In 2026? In Trump 2.0? In the age of AI?...You see that we are off to quite a shaky start. If we try somehow to remain optimistic through this stage, we get to the next step of assigning each of these important decisions to someone or someones. In progressive organizations concerned with the concentration of power, this typically creates consternation and dissonance, so we may require people to get advice from those who will be impacted by the decision or have relevant expertise to it, or both. Then we capture this lengthy list of “rights” in a multi-column spreadsheet of some kind. What happens next is typically, well, nothing. People go back to real life where decisions are made in the complex web of relationships, context, available resources, and situational power that constitutes organizational life.
So why do we do this? What are we trying to solve for and what would be a more accurate and energizing way to solve it? We’d posit that the “why” is three-fold: to harness and distribute power; to limit conflict among people who share a stake in various types of important decisions; and more generally, to promote transparency. These are worthy intentions to be sure. But the false precision of “decision rights” is not the solution.
The most enlightening piece we have read about decision-making in a long time is by Indy Johar of Dark Matter Labs1. He writes:
Any of us who has ever had responsibility for important organizational decisions knows this to be true. So, as Johar goes on to argue in his piece, the question is less who gets to make or advise on every imaginable decision, but how do we design our organizations for “decision ecologies: infrastructures for alignment, dialogue, and iteration.”
What can such ‘infrastructures’ look like in progressive nonprofit organizations? Here are three design offerings:
- Well-constructed and facilitated cross-functional spaces where the people with stakes in recurring types of decisions have frequent opportunities to be in dialogue and, very importantly, to anticipate high-stakes decisions rather than relitigate them after the fact.
Example: A bi-monthly Resource Development Table where representatives from the development, finance, and program teams review potential funding opportunities and align around whether and why to pursue these opportunities.
- Consent-based decision-making that requires participants to pause in front of a decision, thoroughly name the choice point, engage in debate, and ultimately decide together using gradients of agreement. This practice expects rather than avoids the reality that people bring different levels of enthusiasm to an idea at any stage in its development. This gradation of agreement is a feature, not a bug, in Johar’s notion of decision ecologies.
Example: Continuing with the example of a cross-functional Resource Development Table, the convener of this group is the Development Director. It is in her best interest to have alignment with program and finance before she commits the organization to a major funding source. Thus, in these bi-monthly meetings she reviews potential funding sources that she recommends pursuing; creates space for dialogue and debate with her program and finance colleagues; and then holds a gradients of agreement decision-making vote. This way, everyone is on record with their concerns and everyone has participated in the ultimate decision in ways that create both clarity and accountability to execute.
- Consistent spaces for collectively observing decision activation. Because decisions are not in fact discreet things, Johar argues that “the challenge is not to capture the decision but to hold the stream—to design ways of tending to evolving intentionality across time…across shifting contexts.” A straightforward way to design for this is to hold routine space in meeting agendas to reflect on the status of active decisions.
Example: Each quarter, the aforementioned Development Director reserves 45 minutes at the Resource Development Table meeting to reflect on the activation of previously made decisions. With clear, consistent prompts, the group becomes skillful at reflecting on the choices it's made over the last year to pursue particular funding opportunities. Were they in fact awarded the funds? Were they right about how the funder relationships would unfold? Have there been any unintended consequences of the funding?
When we recognize the ways that important decisions actually move, we can make organization design choices that match this reality. This approach, far more than a decision-rights spreadsheet ever will, addresses our three “why's”: to harness and distribute power, to limit conflict, and to promote transparency. The result is a shared and deepening competency in making and activating the decisions that determine our organization's impact.
End Notes
1. Our gratitude to strategist Nick Takamine for introducing us to Indy Johar’s writing.
Resources
- Decisions and Decisioning Substack post by Indy Johar
- Decisions That Learn With You Microsite by JustOrg Design
- The Future Is Collective Book by Niloufar Khonsari
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