I was looking through old digital files and came across a position paper I wrote several years ago from an old role. It dealt with programme governance, funding and the records needed to support an audit. What I realised was that I learned a valuable lesson which stays with me and makes me sensitive to repeating patterns: people making decisions without a clear understanding of what depended on them.
Reading it again, I found myself thinking about how easily an organisation can approve a change in one place while continuing to rely on the old assumptions everywhere else.
That is what I mean by decision control. People should know what they can decide, what they need to consider and who else will be affected. The organisation should then be able to follow that decision through to its consequences and revisit it when circumstances change.
An approval is only part of that job.
Consider a manufacturer choosing a cheaper component. Purchasing may have a sound reason for the change and the authority to make it. But the saving also depends on whether the component affects assembly time, product reliability or warranty claims. Other teams may need to adjust their work before the first order is placed.
The decision may still be a good one. The question is whether the people making it can see those dependencies, involve the right colleagues and weigh the overall effect. A saving in one budget can create work and cost in another.
This is where I think governance needs to become more practical. An organisation can have an approval process for every department and still leave nobody responsible for resolving the consequences between them. Each team may be doing what it has been asked to do. Taken together, their actions can move the organisation away from what it intended.
A useful question is: “When we decided to change this, what else did we consider?” It opens up the reasoning. It allows people to explain the pressures and trade-offs they faced, while making it possible to identify what was missed.
Sometimes there is no identifiable decision to examine. A temporary workaround continues. A vacant post stays unfilled. A recurring shortfall is explained in successive reports. Eventually, the organisation is delivering something different from the original plan, although nobody has explicitly agreed a revised service or accepted its consequences.
That is a decision-control problem too. Repeated exceptions need a point at which someone decides whether to restore the original requirement, change it or accept a defined period of reduced delivery. The authority to accept the wider consequences may sit elsewhere.
The effect on information deserves particular attention. Decisions about how work is carried out also change what an organisation can know about its performance.
Imagine a business replacing telephone feedback with an online survey. The new method might be cheaper and easier to administer. But if some customers are less likely to respond online, a higher satisfaction score could reflect a different group of respondents. Managers need to understand that change before treating the result as evidence of improvement.
A calculation can remain technically correct while the meaning of its inputs changes. Recording where information came from, who it covers and what is missing helps people judge what it can support. When decisions rely on incomplete evidence, the gaps and assumptions need to remain visible as that evidence passes between teams.
Costs need similar care. Reducing an activity does not necessarily reduce expenditure by the same amount. Staff may be redeployed and fixed costs may remain. However, a change in what people do can affect how costs should be allocated and whether forecasts still describe the work being delivered. Those relationships need to be checked explicitly.
This is why I would now place audit and records management within a broader responsibility for managing decisions. Records preserve the evidence and reasoning. Audit can test whether the arrangements work and whether claims are supported. Management still has to establish decision authority, resolve competing priorities and ensure that agreed actions happen.
A decision log is useful when it helps the next person understand what has changed and what they must do. A minute saying “agreed” leaves much of that work undone. A usable record explains the basis of the decision, its intended effect, the assumptions it relies on and who will deal with the consequences. It also gives a reason or date for reviewing it.
The same applies to performance reporting. Recording why something did not happen explains an event. A continuing problem also needs a response: someone with the authority to act, a clear next step and a point at which progress will be checked. Otherwise, the organisation can become very well informed about a problem that continues unchanged.
I would build a few questions into decisions with consequences beyond the immediate team:
• What are we changing, and what outcome do we expect?
• Which other teams, commitments, costs or decisions depend on the current arrangement?
• What evidence supports the change, and where are we relying on assumptions?
• Who has the authority to accept the wider consequences, and who will make the necessary adjustments?
• What will tell us whether the decision worked, and when will we review it?
The amount of work should match the significance of the decision. A routine choice within clear limits may need very little. A change affecting several services, financial commitments or the quality of evidence needs more attention. Clear boundaries can give staff confidence to act and a dependable route for raising issues that exceed their authority.
Before investing in a new system, I would follow one real decision through the organisation. Who supplied the information? Who interpreted it? Who decided, and how did the affected teams find out? What changed in practice? That exercise can reveal where the organisation relies on personal knowledge, repeated checking or informal intervention to keep things moving.
Those workarounds also have a resource cost. Time spent reconstructing a decision or reconciling conflicting assumptions reduces the time available for delivery. Understanding that burden helps distinguish work created by unclear arrangements from a genuine shortage of capacity. Both may need attention.
Rereading the old paper has shifted the question I would ask. Can we show how a decision changed the work, how the consequences were handled and whether the intended outcome followed? The records should help us answer that. The people responsible for the work should be able to answer it too.