Every leadership team that has tried to speed up decision-making has hit the same wall. You cut a layer. You restructure. You launch a “faster decisions” initiative. And within six months, the approval chains are back — thicker than before.
The consensus explanation blames culture. “We need to shift to a more distributed mindset.” “We need to flatten the organization.” “People need to take initiative.” The implication is always the same: fixing decision velocity requires a total cultural transformation. Tear down the hierarchy. Rewrite the operating model. Hope everyone adapts.
The numbers tell a different story. Sixty-eight percent of decisions in hierarchical organizations require five or more layers of approval. Proposals take 14 to 45 days to move from idea to action. Seventy-three percent of frontline workers have ideas for improvement, but only 12 percent can implement them. For every idea that survives the approval chain, 1,000 are killed before they reach the surface.
These are structural problems. And the organizations that have solved them did not flatten their hierarchy — they changed one mechanism.
Handelsbanken — one of the safest banks in the world, with AA credit ratings and zero advertising spend — has operated for over 50 years with branch managers holding very high levels of autonomy [1]. They operate on principles of branch-level trust and broad mandates. Head office provides frameworks, not approvals. When a CEO tried to centralize decision-making, the Board fired him. The hierarchy was preserved as a structure — but decision-making authority was fundamentally redistributed to the branches.
These are structural design choices — distinct from a cultural transformation.
Your decision mechanism is the leverage point. One rule change — who decides and who they consult — produces outsized results while the hierarchy stays intact.
The One Rule
The rule is simple enough to state in a single sentence:
After seeking advice from those affected and those with expertise, decide and announce.
That is the Advice Process [2]. It is a decision mechanism — a structural component you can install within your existing hierarchy. No big cultural change required.
The decision-maker seeks advice. They are not bound by it. They decide. They announce what they decided and why. The hierarchy provides the boundaries. The Advice Process provides the velocity.
Organizations that have implemented this mechanism report four times the decision velocity within six weeks. Zero catastrophic failures. The bottleneck was the structure through which decisions had to travel — the people were never the constraint.
Here is how to implement it in four steps.
Step 1: Classify — Identify Which Decisions Actually Need Approval
Most organizations have far more approval gates than they need. The data is clear: 68 percent of decisions require five or more layers of approval, and the vast majority of those decisions do not need it.
The first step is to separate decisions into three categories:
Just do it. High agreement on what is right, high certainty about the outcome. These decisions should never have been in an approval chain. Your people already know what to do. Remove the gate.
Seek advice, then decide. Moderate agreement or moderate certainty. This is where the Advice Process belongs. The decision-maker consults those affected, consults those with expertise, and then decides. No approval needed. No permission required.
Keep approval. Low agreement, high stakes, irreversible consequences. Some decisions belong at the top. The Advice Process does not eliminate hierarchy — it clarifies where hierarchy is actually necessary.
This classification exercise takes a single workshop. The Agreement-Certainty Matrix — a tool that maps decisions by agreement level and outcome certainty — gives you a visual field of where approval chains are serving you and where they are strangling you.
Most leadership teams discover that 70 to 80 percent of their approval chains are protecting decisions that do not need protection.
Step 2: Reframe — From “Permission to Act” to “Duty to Inform”
The psychological shift is the hardest part. For decades, your managers have been trained to seek permission before acting. The approval chain is not just a process — it is a psychological contract. “If I get approval, I am safe.”
The Advice Process replaces that contract with a different one: “If I have sought advice and informed those affected, I am authorized to decide.”
This is what researchers call “Better Autocracy” [3]. One person translates tension into a proposal, seeks feedback, and makes the final decision. The mechanism preserves decision velocity while incorporating diverse perspectives. It occupies the spectrum between autocracy and consensus — without requiring either.
The shift is structural. You are changing the mechanism through which decisions are made — not asking people to adopt a new mindset. The same people produce different results in a different structure.
Consider the evidence. One client team implemented the Advice Process alone — no cultural transformation, no restructuring. Within six weeks, decision velocity increased four times. Proposals that took 14 to 45 days to move forward were decided in hours. No catastrophic failures. The mechanism did the work.
The reframe is this: you are removing the requirement for permission. People already have the authority to decide.
Step 3: Simplify — Strip to Minimum Rules
The Advice Process requires two prerequisites. Without them, distributed decision-making becomes distributed confusion.
Strategic clarity. People cannot make good decisions at the edge if they do not know what the organization is trying to achieve. Leaders shift from approval gatekeeper to clarity provider. The strategy must be simple enough that a frontline employee can use it to evaluate a decision.
One organization reduced their strategic priorities to a single rule. When a decision arose, it took five minutes instead of two weeks. The result: 28 percent profit growth. The strategy was simple enough to act on.
Boundary setting. The second prerequisite is clear boundaries. Two to five non-negotiable constraints — what you must not do — combined with explicit freedoms — what you can do without asking [4].
The boundary framework is straightforward:
- Freedoms: What you CAN decide without consultation (Bungay’s “Freedom”).
- Constraints: What you MUST NOT do under any circumstances (Bungay’s “Constraints”).
- Consultation required: What you CAN decide, but only after seeking advice (the article’s extension — the Advice Process applied to specific decision types).
This three-part framework extends Bungay’s original Intent + Constraints + Freedom model by explicitly naming where the Advice Process applies.
Within those boundaries, people decide. The hierarchy provides the container. The Advice Process provides the mechanism. Together, they create bounded autonomy — authority that is real, but bounded.
This is a hierarchy with a better decision mechanism — no big cultural change required.
Step 4: Pilot — Safe-to-Try, Don’t Transform
The final mistake is treating implementation as a transformation. You do not need to rewrite your operating model. You need to run an experiment.
The Safe-to-Try framework gives you a structured way to pilot the Advice Process without committing the entire organization:
- Hypothesis. “If we apply the Advice Process to [specific decision type], we will reduce decision time from [current] to [target] without increasing error rate.”
- Action. Define the specific decision the pilot will cover. Who is the decision-maker? Who must they consult? What is the announcement format?
- Duration. Set a time box. Two weeks. Four weeks. Long enough to see patterns, short enough to reverse.
- Success criteria. What does “working” look like? Decision velocity? Decision quality? Team confidence? Define it before you start.
- Reversibility. If the pilot fails, what happens? Can you reverse the decision? Can you return to the approval chain? The answer must be yes.
- Owner. One person owns the pilot. Not a committee. Not a steering group. One person who decides and announces.
- Review. At the end of the duration, review the evidence. Did velocity increase? Did quality hold? Did anyone feel bypassed? Adjust and scale — or stop and learn.
Start with low-stakes decisions. Internal process changes. Team-level choices. Decisions where the cost of being wrong is low and the cost of being slow is high. Build evidence. Build confidence. Scale based on what works, not on what the org chart says should work.
Handelsbanken did not transform overnight [1]. They started with branch-level decisions. They proved the mechanism. They scaled based on evidence. 50 years later, they are one of the safest banks in the world.
The One Rule, Enforced
Here is what you are left with:
After seeking advice from those affected and those with expertise, decide and announce.
That is the entire mechanism. One rule. Installable within your existing hierarchy. No big cultural change required. No org chart revolution.
Your hierarchy stays. Your decision velocity changes.
The evidence is clear. Organizations that replace approval chains with this single mechanism see four times the decision velocity. They see frontline employees acting decisively because they know the boundaries. They see leaders shifting from approval gatekeeper to clarity provider — which is what leadership should be.
The problem lived in the mechanism through which decisions traveled within it. Change the mechanism. Keep the structure. Watch what happens.
This piece extends the thesis of Less Managers Is More Management: Why Agentic Systems Redistribute Management to Everyone — which diagnoses why authority must move to the edge. This piece provides the mechanism for how.
Sources
- Don Ledingham: Handelsbanken – a case study in the power of decentralisation — 2024
- Frédéric Laloux: Reinventing Organizations (Nelson Parker, 2014) — The Advice Process definition: “Anyone can make any decision as long as they seek advice from those affected and those with expertise.”
- Sebastian Klein: The Loop Approach: How to Transform Your Organization (Campus Verlag, 2023) — “Better Autocracy” framing: preserves decision velocity while incorporating diverse perspectives.
- Stephen Bungay: The Art of Action (2011) — Boundary framework: Freedoms + Constraints + Consultation required.
Please note: 51&even is an AI-first organization. We embrace AI at every step of our value creation and build our processes with a deep integration of human-AI capability. Humans always have the last decision. But this text was heavily built with AI.