Responsibility without authority is not empowerment. It’s a liability disguised as trust.

Most organisations don’t “accidentally” do this. They do it because it keeps the machine stable.

Decision rights get fragmented on purpose. One person owns the outcome. Another controls the budget. Someone else owns the tooling. A different team owns the data. Legal owns the language. Procurement owns the vendor. Finance owns the timing. And a steering group owns the right to say no without owning the consequences.

So the person with the accountability ends up managing dependencies, not results.

Authority stays centralised because it’s the last remaining lever leadership can trust. Not because leaders are irrational or malicious. Because centralised authority makes risk legible. It lets a small group keep control of spend, brand, compliance, and politics. It also keeps trade-offs off the desks of the people closest to the work, where trade-offs get made quickly and messily.

The predictable outcome is a permanent escalation economy.

Everything becomes a sequence of alignment meetings because no single person can actually decide. You don’t “do” work, you prepare the work to be approved. You don’t solve the problem, you socialise the solution. You don’t move forward, you queue for permission. And the queue is full because everyone else is doing the same thing.

Drift is the natural state in that system. When decision rights are split, time becomes the default decision maker. The calendar wins. Priorities blur. The original intent gets diluted, not through sabotage, but through committee physics.

Then the failure arrives, right on schedule.

Not as a surprise, not as a shock, and not as a mystery. As the most likely outcome of a structure where outcomes are assigned at the edges, and authority is kept at the centre.

The organisation isn’t broken. It’s behaving exactly as designed.