The Framework for Distributed Decisions

As you scale, you can't be the bottleneck for every decision. This lesson provides practical frameworks for distributing decision-making throughout your organization. Learn how to create a 'decision-making stack' that clarifies ownership, accelerates speed, and empowers your team to act with confidence, even when you're not in the room.

The Founder's Trap

There is a moment in the life of every growing thing—a business, a movement, a team—when the person who started it becomes the very thing that holds it back. It is not a moment of malice, but of love. It is the founder, the leader, the passionate expert who, by being the final word on every choice, becomes a bottleneck. The flow of progress, once a torrent, slows to a trickle that can only pass through the narrow channel of their inbox. This isn’t a failure of intent; it's a crisis of scale. When you are the only one who holds the map, everyone must stop and ask you for directions. Every small course correction, every question about a turn in the road, comes to you. Your day becomes a series of frantic, fragmented conversations, and the organization’s velocity is forever capped by your personal bandwidth. Your team, full of smart, capable people, learns to wait. They wait for your approval on a marketing tagline. They wait for your sign-off on a minor feature. They wait for you to settle a debate between two departments. And in that waiting, the organization’s metabolism slows. Opportunities are missed. Competitors who move faster gain ground. Frustration ferments. The very passion that ignited the enterprise now threatens to smother it. This is the Founder's Trap. It is the paradox of becoming so essential that you prevent the thing you built from truly growing up. The escape is not to work harder or faster, but to fundamentally rewire the organization’s brain—to distribute the thinking, to delegate not just tasks, but true ownership of decisions.

The Founder's Trap

Unpacking the Decision Stack

To escape the trap, you need a map. Not a map of your product or your market, but a map of how choices are made. This is the Decision Stack, a mental model for connecting your highest-level strategy to the daily actions of your team. It’s a framework for clarity, ensuring that when people are empowered to make a call, they are making it with the same context you would. Imagine your organization’s purpose as a series of cascading questions. The stack provides the answers, moving from the abstract to the concrete. At the very top, you have your **Vision and Mission**. This is your North Star. *Where are we going?* It's the unchanging destination on the horizon. For an electric car company, the vision might be "accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy." It is vast, ambitious, and provides a timeless sense of direction. Below that sits **Strategy**. This is the path you've chosen to take toward that vision. *How will we get there?* It’s a coherent set of choices that define how you'll compete and win. It is not a list of goals; it is a narrative of advantage. Our electric car company’s strategy might be to build a brand around performance and luxury, creating a halo effect for more affordable models later. This layer explicitly defines what you are *not* doing—you are not, for example, starting with a budget car. Next are your **Objectives**. These are the signposts along your strategic path. *What matters right now on this journey?* Usually framed as Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), they give a near-term focus. For the car company, a key objective might be "Successfully launch our flagship sedan," with key results tied to production numbers, pre-orders, and critical reviews. This is strategy made measurable. Finally, at the base of the stack, are **Opportunities and Principles**. This is where most work happens. *What actions do we take, and how do we do the work?* Opportunities are the specific problems you choose to solve or bets you choose to place, like developing a new battery cooling system. Principles are the codified rules that guide daily trade-offs. For instance, a principle might be: "In any design decision, prioritize safety over aesthetics." This stack is powerful because it works in two directions. From the top down, it answers, "How will we do this?" From the bottom up, it answers, "Why are we doing this?" An engineer working on the cooling system can trace their work all the way up to the grand vision. When they have to make a choice about two different materials, they can consult the principles and the strategy. Should it be cheaper or more reliable? The strategy—"build a brand around performance and luxury"—provides the answer. The decision is now distributed, but not disconnected.

The Art of Sorting the Choices

The Decision Stack provides the 'why,' but you still need a mechanism for the 'who.' Handing every decision down the chain is not empowerment; it’s abdication. The art is in knowing what to delegate and what to retain. Not all decisions are created equal. You must learn to sort them. A simple, powerful way to do this is to classify them by type and consequence. Start with a basic filter: divide decisions into three categories. First, there are **Strategic Decisions**. These are the company-defining choices that have long-term, high-impact consequences. They are difficult and expensive to reverse. This includes choices about which markets to enter, major acquisitions, or fundamental changes to your business model. These decisions almost always stay with the leadership team. They are the very definition of steering the ship. Second are **Tactical Decisions**. These are choices about how to execute the strategy. They are important, but they operate within the guardrails you’ve already set. Examples include setting the marketing budget for a quarter, designing the architecture for a new software feature, or structuring a sales team. These are prime candidates for delegation to team leads and department heads—the people with the most expertise in that domain. Finally, there are **Operational Decisions**. These are the frequent, day-to-day choices that keep the organization running. They are the lifeblood of execution. This could be a customer service rep deciding how to resolve a client issue, an engineer choosing a specific coding library, or a marketer A/B testing an email subject line. These decisions should be pushed as far down into the organization as possible, to the people closest to the information. But even this isn't enough. Within the tactical and operational buckets, you need one more layer of filtering: the concept of "one-way" versus "two-way" doors. A "two-way door" decision is reversible. If you make a mistake, you can go back through the door, learn from the experience, and try a different path. Hiring a junior employee, testing a new ad campaign, or changing an internal process are all likely two-way door decisions. These should be delegated aggressively. They are the primary vehicle for your team to learn, build judgment, and develop ownership. A "one-way door" decision, however, is nearly impossible to reverse. Once you walk through, you can't easily come back. Launching a flagship product in a new country, making a public commitment to a certain technology, or signing a multi-year exclusive partnership are one-way doors. The cost of failure is immense. These decisions, even if they seem tactical, demand slower, more careful consideration and typically involve senior leadership. Your job as a leader is to identify these irreversible choices and ensure they receive the right level of scrutiny. By sorting every decision through this two-part filter—strategic vs. tactical vs. operational, and one-way vs. two-way door—you create a clear system. You are no longer the bottleneck. You are the architect of a decision-making machine.

Freedom and Responsibility in Practice

Perhaps no company has taken the idea of distributed decision-making to heart more than Netflix. Their culture, famously documented in their "Culture Deck," is built on a philosophy of "Freedom and Responsibility." The premise is simple: hire stunningly talented people, give them the context of the Decision Stack, and then give them the freedom to make their own choices. At Netflix, there are no vacation policies or expense policies in the traditional sense. The guideline is simply: "Act in Netflix's best interest." This radical trust extends to the very core of how work gets done. Instead of a complex hierarchy of approvals, Netflix uses a concept called the "Informed Captain." For any significant decision, a single person is designated as the captain. Their job is not to build consensus, but to gather input, listen to all perspectives, and then make a judgment call. They alone are responsible for the outcome. This model is designed for speed and clarity. It avoids the paralysis of decision-by-committee, where great ideas can be watered down to a bland compromise that everyone can agree on. Instead, it empowers an individual expert to make a bold, informed choice. The responsibility of the rest of the team is to debate vigorously beforehand but, once the captain makes the call, to commit to it fully. This doesn’t mean anarchy. The "freedom" is bounded by the "responsibility" to understand the company's strategic context—the Decision Stack. CEO Reed Hastings has said he prides himself on making as few decisions as possible. His role is not to be the chief decider, but the chief context-setter. By ensuring everyone understands the strategy, the market, and the long-term goals, he empowers thousands of informed captains to make wise decisions without his input. This high-trust culture is not for everyone. It requires an incredible density of high-performing, self-motivated individuals. But it serves as a powerful illustration of the ultimate goal: creating an organization where great decisions can happen anywhere, at any time, because the strategic context is clear and people are trusted to act.

The Architecture of Trust

Distributing decisions is not just about frameworks and models; it is an act of building trust. You cannot simply hand someone a RACI chart or a copy of your strategy and expect them to succeed. You must create an environment where making a choice—and even making the wrong one—is safe. This architecture of trust rests on two pillars: clarity and psychological safety. Clarity comes from the hard work we've already discussed: defining the Decision Stack, sorting decisions by type, and clarifying roles. When someone knows what they own, understands the strategic context, and is aware of the guardrails, they can act with confidence. Ambiguity is the enemy of empowerment. Vague instructions or unclear lines of authority lead to hesitation or, worse, political maneuvering. As a leader, your most important job is to fight for clarity on behalf of your team. Psychological safety, however, is more fragile. It is the shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. It means you can ask a "stupid" question, challenge a prevailing opinion, or admit a mistake without fear of humiliation or punishment. Without it, true delegation is impossible. If every delegated decision that goes wrong results in blame, people will stop taking risks. They will revert to seeking your approval for everything, and you will find yourself right back in the Founder's Trap. How do you build it? You model it. You admit your own mistakes openly. You celebrate lessons learned from failures, not just victories. When a team member makes a poor choice on a "two-way door" decision, you don’t punish them. You get curious. You ask, "What was your thinking here? What did we learn?" You treat the mistake as a tuition payment for their development. Ultimately, the framework for distributed decisions is a framework for growth—both for the organization and for the people within it. It is the conscious decision to scale yourself by scaling the judgment of your team. The goal is not to remove yourself from the equation, but to multiply your impact by becoming an architect, a teacher, and a coach, rather than the answer to every question. The final step is to let go, and trust the machine you've built.