Ask several executives who made the final call on the company's last major technology investment. Do it separately. Do not give them choices.

The answers may not match.

One person will name the executive committee. Another will say the business sponsor. Someone else will point to the CIO. A fourth may describe a sequence of meetings without identifying anyone who actually decided.

That is more than a communication problem. It means the organization does not have a shared understanding of how decision authority moves.

This pattern surfaced during work inside a complex organization. On paper, the governance structure looked clear. In practice, people working within it disagreed about who held the final decision, what one governance body could authorize, and when a request could move around the established intake process. The details here have been combined and anonymized, but the structural problem is real.

Technology leaders often encounter it early because major technology investments cross budgets, functions, operating priorities, and executive authority. When nobody can trace the decision, the CIO is still expected to execute it.

The Wrong Diagnosis

Leadership teams tend to describe this kind of breakdown in familiar terms. We need better communication. We need greater visibility. We need the right people in the room.

Sometimes they do. But none of those remedies answers the more important question: who had the authority to make the call?

That question changes the conversation. It moves the problem away from whether people feel aligned and toward whether the operating structure is clear. If reasonable people give different answers about who decided, another meeting will not resolve the underlying issue.

Communication can clarify a decision. It cannot supply decision rights that were never established.

For a CIO, the distinction is practical. Better communication may improve the next meeting. Clear decision rights determine whether the resulting decision will hold when budgets tighten, priorities shift, or an executive who disagreed decides to reopen it.

The Process On Paper And The One People Use

Most complex organizations have a formal path for major decisions. It may run through an investment committee, funding board, architecture council, or executive team. The body has a name, a charter, and a list of members.

Work rarely follows the chart that neatly.

An MIT Sloan Management Review article, published more than two decades ago, observed that formal boxes and reporting lines only partially reflect how work gets done. Relationships, urgency, and access create informal paths alongside the formal structure.

That is not inherently bad. Informal paths can help an organization move. The trouble begins when they carry decision authority without anyone acknowledging that they do.

A request stalls in the normal intake process, so its sponsor goes directly to someone who can release funding. A governance council discusses a proposal, but nobody knows whether its approval is final or merely advisory. A business leader secures an executive commitment before technology has assessed the work. Each action may be understandable on its own. Together, they create a decision process that exists in practice but nowhere in writing.

The official process continues to meet. The real process determines what happens.

The Cost Of An Untraceable Decision

The first cost is weak accountability. Money gets allocated, but nobody clearly owns the tradeoff behind the allocation. If the investment displaces other work, misses its expected return, or creates operating risk, responsibility becomes negotiable.

The second cost is repeated governance. A proposal appears to have been approved, then resurfaces before another committee because nobody knows the limit of the first group's authority. Senior leaders spend time reconsidering decisions the organization believed were settled.

The third cost is instability. A decision nobody can attribute is easy to reopen. The project may be funded and underway, yet still lack an executive willing to defend it when conditions change.

McKinsey has connected this ambiguity to growing organizational complexity, matrixed structures, and the volume of digital communication. In one survey it cited, 72 percent of senior executives said bad strategic decisions were about as common as good ones, or were the prevailing norm in their organizations.

For the CIO, these costs become concrete. A roadmap changes without a corresponding decision record. A team begins work that never passed through the stated intake path. A budget line survives approval but has no business executive prepared to defend the outcome.

Why People Walk Around The Front Door

Organizations usually treat workarounds as a compliance problem. Someone ignored the process. Someone failed to follow the governance model.

That explanation is convenient because it blames behavior without examining the path people were expected to use.

When the front door moves too slowly, demands approvals nobody can explain, or sends requests into a body with uncertain authority, people find another entrance. They go to the executive who can release money, apply pressure, or force the work onto the roadmap.

Repeated workarounds still deserve scrutiny on their own terms. They are also evidence leaders should read carefully. People are revealing which parts of the formal process they do not believe will produce a decision.

Over time, the workaround becomes normal. New employees learn it from experienced ones. Business sponsors begin with the informal route because they assume the formal route will eventually be bypassed anyway. The organization now has two processes, but only one is subject to governance.

Run The Three-Person Test

There is a simple way to determine whether this problem exists on your team.

Choose the last significant technology investment. Ask three members of the leadership team, separately, who made the final decision. Do not prompt them or let them compare answers first.

If the answers differ, do not force an immediate consensus. The disagreement is useful. It shows that the team does not share a reliable account of how the decision was made.

Then reconstruct the decision:

• Who framed the original request?
• Who evaluated the tradeoffs?
• Which group recommended action?
• Who controlled the funding?
• Who had the authority to say yes or no?
• Who is accountable for the business result?

Those roles may belong to different people, and distributing them is fine. What creates the risk is leaving final authority and accountability open to interpretation.

Map What Happened Before Redesigning It

Once leaders see the gap, their first instinct is often to create another meeting, committee, or communication cadence. That usually adds more activity to a structure that is already unclear.

Start by mapping what actually happened.

Document the path the decision took, including the conversations and interventions that sat outside the formal process. Compare that path with the one described in the governance model. The difference between them is the work.

Then make four things explicit:

• The authority assigned to each type of decision
• The person accountable for the final call
• The conditions that require escalation
• The point at which a decision becomes final

Do not eliminate every informal conversation. That would be unrealistic and probably counterproductive. Informal influence will always exist. The objective is to prevent informal influence from quietly becoming unaccountable authority.

Most teams already know where the real authority sits. What they lack is a shared willingness to name it and a written process that matches reality.

Until they do, the CIO remains responsible for delivering decisions nobody else can explain.

The gap between an official decision process and the real one is usually visible once someone asks the right question. If you want a structured way to map it on your own team, we can walk through it together.