Stuck one level too high.

On the struggling programmes where we have counted, more than half the stuck decisions are not stuck because they are hard. They are stuck because they are sitting with the wrong person.

A decision made by the wrong person does as much damage as no decision at all. The route is different. The result is the same: the programme waits.

Too high, and the people with authority become the block. The programme director who reviews every permit. The client who signs off every scope change regardless of size. The steering committee that must endorse every design decision above a cost line, however routine. Each is right to want control. Each is, without meaning to be, the thing in the way.

Too low, and the decisions do not hold. The supervisor who agrees a sequence change the main contractor then overrules. The project manager who commits to a date the programme cannot support. Each produces a decision that gets unwound later, at cost.

Ask one simple question of any programme: are issues being resolved at the right level, by the person with both the authority and the information? The honest answer, programme after programme, is occasionally. By luck, or by the instinct of a good manager, not because the system puts them there. Far more often than anyone would like to admit, a decision sits one tier too high, waiting on someone who lacks the information, while the person who has the information waits for a permission they already hold.

Look at the supervisor. He has the competence and the facts to make the sequencing call. He escalates it anyway, because nobody has ever told him where his authority begins and ends, and he has learned that acting without permission carries a cost that deferring does not. So he defers. The decision goes up, consumes a tier that need not be involved, and comes back two days later with the answer he would have given. Multiply that by every supervisor, every day.

One manufacturer scored itself at 2 out of 5 on whether senior leaders were free of decisions that belonged below them, and 2.1 on whether anyone understood which decisions must come up a level. Nobody had drawn the line, so everything crossed it.

The fix is the conversation most organisations avoid. Not an org chart. A specific, facilitated conversation that produces a map of who decides what, at what threshold, within what time, with what information. Agreed in a room. Held under pressure.

On your programme, who is deciding things that someone closer to the work could decide today?