A process is not only a way to get things done. It is also a social technology, and one of its quiet functions is to spread responsibility so thin that no single person has to decide anything, or answer for the result. The more hands a decision passes through, the less any hand owns it. That is not a flaw most organisations are trying to fix. For many of them, without ever saying so out loud, it is the reason the process exists.
A process is a machine for spreading responsibility thin
Every process distributes a decision across more people than the decision needs. That is what a process is for, on paper: no single point of failure, no lone cowboy, no unchecked call. In practice, the same design has a second effect that nobody prints in the handbook. When a decision belongs to five people, it belongs to no one.
Psychologists gave this a name a long time ago. In 1968, John Darley and Bibb Latané described the diffusion of responsibility: the more witnesses are present, the less any one of them feels obliged to act. Each assumes someone else will, or already has. The effect is strongest precisely when the group is largest, which is the opposite of what common sense predicts.
An organisation is a permanent crowd. A process is the crowd written down. Every approval step, every “consulted party,” every sign-off adds a witness to the decision and subtracts a fraction of ownership from each of them. Albert Bandura made the point sharper: when work is cut into subtasks, people focus on their piece and quietly forget the whole. The division of labour is also a division of conscience.
None of this requires bad people. It requires only a structure in which no individual is the person the outcome lands on. Give me a slow, evasive organisation and I will rarely find laziness. I will find a process that lets everyone be blameless while nothing moves.
There is a small, almost comic piece of evidence for this. Researchers who study how people answer requests have found that the same message gets a longer, more useful reply when it is sent to one named person than when it is sent to a group, even a small one. Address a crowd and each member quietly assumes someone else will take it. Address a person and the excuse disappears. An organisation runs on the first kind of message far more than it likes to admit. Most of its procedure is, in the end, a way of speaking to the group instead of to a person.
“Check with the relevant team” is where decisions go to die
There is a sentence you hear in every organisation, and it always means the same thing. “You will need to check with the relevant team.” On its face, it is diligence: route the question to the people who know. Nine times out of ten, it is deferral wearing the costume of rigour.
The relevant team, once you reach it, tends to point you at another relevant team. That one is relevant too. The decision, meanwhile, is relevant to no one. Everyone in the chain has technically done their job. They forwarded, they escalated, they looped in. Not one of them decided.
David Graeber, in The Utopia of Rules (2015), described bureaucracy as the water we have stopped noticing we swim in. His argument was not that rules are useless. It was that we have come to treat procedure as a form of intelligence, when often it is a way to avoid the discomfort of a judgment call. A rule you can hide behind is more valuable, to the person hiding, than a rule that works.
The tell is simple. Ask who can say yes. In a healthy structure, someone can, and they know it. In a sick one, the honest answer is a shrug and a redirection. The process has become a maze with no room marked “decision.” You can route a person around that maze for months. You can route a whole company around it for years.
It helps to separate two kinds of rule. One kind exists to make a good decision easier: it strips out noise, it guards against the obvious mistake, it lets a busy person act without reinventing the basics every time. The other kind exists to make a decision optional: it adds a step whose real function is to give everyone a reason to wait. On a slide they look identical. You can tell them apart with a single question. Does this rule end in someone deciding, or does it end in someone being consulted? A rule that always ends in consultation is not governance. It is a waiting room with better furniture.
A ceiling always turns into a floor
Give someone a maximum and they will treat it as a target. Tell a supplier “three weeks at the most” and you have not set a limit. You have set an expectation, and it is the wrong one. You meant the latest acceptable date. They heard the date they are allowed to aim for.
Cyril Northcote Parkinson put the mechanism in print in 1955, in a satirical essay that turned out to be one of the most durable observations in management: work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Offer three weeks, the work takes three weeks. Offer six, it takes six. The size of the container decides the size of the contents.
Eliyahu Goldratt described the human engine behind it in Critical Chain (1997), under the name student syndrome. People start a task at the last responsible moment, then compress all the real effort into the final stretch before the deadline. Any safety margin you built into the estimate is spent before the work even begins. So the maximum is not just reached. It is reached with no slack left, which means the first surprise pushes it past the line.
This is why padding estimates makes projects later, not safer. Every buffer you add is read as permission, consumed early, and gone when you need it. The ceiling you set to protect yourself becomes the floor everyone builds on. Then the floor gives way.
The steering committee that decided nothing
I once watched a company try to fix slow decisions by building a machine for making them. It is the clearest case I know of a process quietly doing the opposite of its stated job, so it is worth telling slowly.
The company was scaling. It had grown from a room of people who all knew each other into several floors of people who did not. Decisions that used to happen in a corridor now took weeks, and leadership felt it. The diagnosis, reasonable on its face, was that the organisation lacked structure. So they built some. A weekly steering committee for anything that crossed team lines. A responsibility matrix, the familiar grid of Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed, filled in for every significant initiative.
On paper it was textbook. In the room it was a beautifully lit dead end. The committee met every week. Minutes were taken. Actions were “assigned.” And almost nothing was decided, because the design had made deciding optional. Everyone at the table was Consulted, which meant everyone had a right to an opinion and no obligation to a conclusion. The “Accountable” letter sat in a cell on a spreadsheet, attached to a role rather than to a human being who could feel it in their stomach on a Sunday night.
Here is the part my brain would not let go of. The more thorough the structure looked, the less anyone owned. Each week, a hard question would arrive. It would be discussed, genuinely and intelligently, by people who were not stupid and not lazy. And then it would be parked: pending more input, pending another team, pending the next session. The grid gave everyone a place to stand where the decision was always someone else’s line item.
The clearest moment came in one of those weekly sessions. Someone finally asked the plain question: who actually owns this, as a person, not as a box on a grid. The room went quiet in a very particular way. Not hostile. Genuinely puzzled. Three people could each explain which part of it touched their team. Not one could say the words this is mine. The letter that marked the accountable party pointed at a role that, in practice, no single human occupied. Everyone had assumed the structure contained an owner somewhere, the way you assume a building has a night watchman you have never met. It did not. The owner was a cell in a spreadsheet, and a cell does not lie awake on a Sunday night.
I keep seeing the same shape in places that have nothing to do with each other. A person waits all day for a delivery that never comes, calls three numbers, and is told by each that it is not their part. A board spends an hour on a decision and adjourns without making it. A committee reviews a plan for the fourth time. Different rooms, identical physics. When responsibility is spread across enough surfaces, it stops resting on any of them. I do not experience this as a metaphor. I experience it as the same event happening in different costumes, and I cannot switch off the recognition.
What broke the loop was not a better matrix. It was one sentence, said out loud by the CEO in the room: “This one is mine. I will decide it by Thursday, and you can hold me to that.” Nothing else about the process changed that week. The committee still met. The grid still existed. But a single decision now had a single human attached to it, with a date and a witness, and it moved. The lesson was not that structure is bad. It was that structure had been used, without anyone intending it, as a way to make sure no one ever had to say “mine.”
The people a delay does not touch will always set the pace
A delay only accelerates for the person it lands on. This is the mechanism that explains most stuck projects better than any story about skill or motivation, and it is the one leaders are slowest to name, because naming it sounds like an accusation.
It is not. Consider the honest position of someone who is blocking your project without malice. The delay does not reach them. It reaches the next team, the end client, the leader who has to report upward. Their own week is full of things that do reach them. So they are not dragging their feet on purpose. They are simply, rationally, somewhere else. You are urgent to you. You are background noise to them.
Maximilien Ringelmann measured a version of this in 1913, pulling on ropes. He found that as you add people to a group, the effort each person contributes goes down, not up. Part of it is coordination, but part of it is motivation: in a crowd, individual effort becomes invisible, so it quietly shrinks. Add a second condition, that the consequences of slowness fall on someone else entirely, and the effort does not just shrink. It evaporates, cheerfully and with a clear conscience.
You cannot fix this with more meetings, because meetings do not change who the delay touches. You fix it by changing the incidence: by making sure the person setting the pace is also a person the outcome reaches.
Changing the incidence is unglamorous and specific. It can mean that the person who owns the deadline is the one who has to stand in front of the client if it slips, rather than a colleague two doors down. It can mean that the team causing the wait is made to feel the wait, instead of exporting it cleanly to the team next door. You are not making anyone work harder through willpower. You are moving the consequence back to where the choice is made. Effort follows consequence. It almost always has.
Naming a single owner is the only fix that works
The cure for diluted responsibility is not more process. It is a name. Not a role, not a committee, not a box on a chart. A specific person who can decide, who knows the outcome is theirs, and who can be seen carrying it.
Ringelmann’s own experiments point straight at the remedy. Effort recovers when contribution becomes identifiable, when the group is small enough that each member is visibly indispensable, and when the goal is explicit rather than vague. Every one of those is a way of undoing anonymity. A named owner is anonymity’s opposite. The moment a decision has one person’s name on it, the diffusion collapses, because there is no longer a crowd to hide inside.
This is unglamorous work. It is not a transformation programme. Most of the time it is the reverse: removing the layer of procedure that let everyone be a little bit responsible, and replacing it with one line that says who answers for the result. Organisations resist it, not because they disagree, but because a named owner is exposed, and exposure is exactly what the process was quietly protecting people from.
The opposite of process is not chaos. It is a name
People defend process as the only thing standing between them and chaos. It is a false choice, and it is worth refusing. The opposite of a process that decides nothing is not a free-for-all. It is a person who can decide, and who answers for it.
Think of the one who commissions a building. The mason answers for the wall. The electrician answers for the wiring. Each is faultless on their own stretch, and the building is late anyway, because no trade answers for the building. Only the client does. They are the single party for whom the whole thing exists as one object rather than a set of parts.
Every organisation needs that person for every outcome that matters. Not a committee that owns the building. A name. The test is not whether your process is thorough. Thorough is easy. The test is whether, for anything that matters, you can point at one human being who answers for the whole, and who has more than their voice to make it happen. If you cannot, you do not have a governance problem. You have a very well documented way of never deciding anything.
I am not against process. I have built plenty of it, and I will build more. What I am against is the quiet substitution: the day a process stops helping people decide and starts standing in for the decision itself. That substitution never announces itself. It arrives dressed as diligence, as maturity, as the thing a serious company is supposed to do as it grows. Which is exactly why someone has to keep asking the rude question out loud, about every outcome that matters. Who answers for this. Not which team. Who.
Sources
- John M. Darley, Bibb Latané, Bystander Intervention in Emergencies: Diffusion of Responsibility, 1968: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility
- C. Northcote Parkinson, Parkinson’s Law, 1955: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
- David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, 2015: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Utopia_of_Rules
- Maximilien Ringelmann, Recherches sur les moteurs animés (Ringelmann effect), 1913: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringelmann_effect
- Eliyahu M. Goldratt, Critical Chain (student syndrome), 1997: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_syndrome
FAQ
Why do committees and approval chains often fail to make decisions?
Because spreading a decision across more people spreads responsibility so thin that no single person owns it — a mechanism psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latané documented in 1968 as diffusion of responsibility. A responsibility matrix that marks everyone as ‘Consulted’ and no human being as truly ‘Accountable’ produces exactly this: genuinely intelligent discussion every week, and nothing decided, because the design made deciding optional.
How do you fix an organization where decisions keep getting deferred?
Not with more process, but with a name. A specific person, not a role or a committee, who can say yes, knows the outcome is theirs, and can be seen carrying it. The moment a decision has one person’s name attached to it — with a date and a witness — the diffusion collapses, because there is no longer a crowd to hide inside.
