Date:
001
The two authorities
I remember standing outside a boardroom on the seventeenth floor, half-listening to two directors continue, in a lowered voice, a conversation that had supposedly ended twenty minutes earlier inside that room. The decision had been made. Everyone had nodded. And yet here it was, still being negotiated, in a corridor, by two people quietly deciding how much of it they actually intended to honour.
I have seen this exact scene, in one form or another, more times than I can comfortably count.
It is tempting to call this a discipline problem, to say that people are not following through, that accountability is soft, that someone needs to hold the line more firmly next time. In my experience, that diagnosis is almost always too generous to the organisation and too hard on the people in it. Something structural is usually at work, and it rarely announces itself.
The pattern, once you know to look for it, shows up with remarkable consistency. I have come to think of it as the two authorities, a formal system of governance that exists on paper, and an informal system of trust that exists in practice, running quietly alongside it. The first is visible, documented, and easy to redesign. The second is invisible, earned over years, and almost impossible to redesign by decree. When a decision is made inside the first system without ever touching the second, it tends to survive the room and dissolve soon after. Not through sabotage. Through simple erosion, as the people whose trust actually carries weight in daily work quietly decide, on their own terms, how far to take it.
We saw this clearly inside a large clinical organisation that had recently invested in strengthening its governance. New committees. Documented decision rights. A clear answer, on paper, to who could approve what. And still, week after week, decisions that should have held were softening somewhere between the boardroom and the ward.
002
How we worked
Pause. We began not with the governance charts but with discovery conversations across every level of the organisation, executives, clinical leads, ward managers, long-serving staff, anchored around one question: when something needs to happen quickly, who do you actually go to? We deliberately asked this before looking at a single org chart, so the answer wouldn't be shaped by what people thought the "correct" answer should be.
Reflect. Using the KLAR diagnostic, we mapped every answer against the formal decision-rights document, producing what we came to call a decision map, a simple visual showing where documented authority and lived authority overlapped, and, more importantly, where they didn't. The gaps were consistent and traced back to a small, identifiable group of clinical leads and operational managers whose informal endorsement had quietly become the real precondition for anything to stick.
Integrate. Rather than dismantling that informal network, which would have removed the very relationships holding delivery together, we built it into the formal process. A short pre-decision review step was introduced, routing significant decisions through the people the decision map had identified, before they reached the committee that would formally approve them. Nothing about the governance structure was torn up. It was simply given a second, honest input it had never had.
Evolve. Over the following two quarters, we tracked how many decisions were being revisited or quietly renegotiated after being formally made, the exact behaviour we'd first noticed in that corridor. That number fell sharply, and stayed down. We handed the decision map itself back to the organisation, along with a simple cadence for keeping it current as people and relationships shift, so the work didn't depend on us remaining involved.
By the time the engagement closed, decisions were holding, not because people had become more compliant, but because, for the first time, the way decisions were made matched the way trust had always actually worked in that organisation.
003
A SkyKlar Reflection
I no longer think of a decision as a single event that happens in a room. I think of it as something closer to an institution, fragile, ongoing, and dependent for its survival on people who were never in the room continuing to believe in it, quietly, in the weeks that follow.
So I have started asking a different question of the leaders I work with. Not, was this the right decision? But, who needs to trust this decision for it to still be true next week, and were they actually part of making it?
