Journal · March 2026

Map decision rights before you redesign

A product organization in Taoyuan asked us to help “clarify the platform.” Seven people used that word in the first round of interviews. Two of them could approve a vendor. One could stop a release. Four could only complain in a chat thread that leadership did not read.

The company had already paid for an operating-model redesign. The slides were competent. They also assumed that titles matched authority, which is a pleasant fiction in any dense industrial group, and a dangerous one when a platform team sits between plants and a consumer brand.

We spent the first ten days ignoring the proposed boxes. Instead we traced purchase orders, change-advisory boards, and the unofficial Friday call with a plant director who never appeared on the RACI. That call was the real gate. Until it was named, every “agile ritual” was a performance for Taipei while the line waited for a man in a noisy office to nod.

Decision-rights maps are ugly. They include people who will be offended to see themselves drawn as blockers. That offense is data. If you smooth it away to keep a workshop friendly, you will redesign a system that does not exist.

When we finally hung the map in the corridor — not in a passworded deck — two directors asked to be removed from the “can stop work” column. We left them there until they delegated in writing. The redesign that followed was smaller than the original proposal, and it lasted past the consultant’s last invoice, which is the only aesthetic we care about.

If you are about to buy another model, pause. Ask who can stop a purchase order this week. Write the names. Then decide whether you still need new boxes.