The RACI convention names four positions on a decision, and only one of them is accountable for the outcome.
Why it matters when the plan changes
When a plan changes shape, the decisions it depends on move before the org chart does. A pricing call that once sat with a regional head now sits between a product line and a market. Until someone says so in words, the decision keeps arriving at two desks or none. Sull, Homkes and Sull found only nine per cent of managers can rely on colleagues in other functions all the time, and cross-cutting decisions like this one depend on exactly that reliability. The plan does not fail loudly; it simply stops advancing where a choice was needed.
The tension is between design and practice. Formal design records the mandate on paper: roles, reporting lines, governance. Real ownership is who actually decides, delivers and is consulted, and where ownership is assumed or duplicated. The RACI convention names one person accountable, individually and ultimately, for the outcome. The two diverge most in the months after a restructure, and the gap is not visible in either document alone.
In practice
A regional structure is replaced by product lines. Pricing used to be a regional decision and the new design assumes a single product owner sets it. Two leaders each believe they hold the call, and both are partly right: one owns the margin, the other owns the customer. For eleven weeks no price moves. Nothing in the plan said who decides, so the plan waited.
Evidence
Commitments that run across functions and units are reported as far less dependable than commitments running up and down a reporting line.
Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull, Why Strategy Execution Unravels and What to Do About It, Harvard Business Review (2015)The common responsibility convention separates being involved in a task from being ultimately answerable for its outcome.
Responsibility assignment matrix (RACI), Wikipedia (2026)
What it cannot tell you
Decision rights specify who is entitled to decide, not whether that person has the judgement, information or standing to decide well. Naming an owner does not resolve disagreement between legitimate interests, such as margin against customer relationship, and the framework is silent on how those interests should be weighed once ownership is assigned.
Questions
A reporting line says who a person answers to. Decision rights say who is entitled to settle a particular question. The RACI convention, described in its 2026 Wikipedia entry, distinguishes this from being merely consulted or informed: a manager can sit over a team without holding the right to set its priorities.
One named person per decision, not per function. A matrix multiplies the number of parties with a legitimate interest, which is useful for consultation and damaging for authority. The workable pattern is a single accountable owner, a short consulted list, and a written rule for what happens when they disagree.
As delay that nobody can attribute. Meetings repeat without a conclusion, and escalation becomes the normal route rather than the exception. Sull, Homkes and Sull, writing in Harvard Business Review in 2015, found only nine per cent of managers could rely on colleagues in other functions all the time, a similar gap in ownership.
Whenever the plan changes what has to be decided. A new operating model, a change of ownership or a new dependency all move decisions before anyone updates the chart. Reviewing them at that moment is cheaper than discovering the gap three quarters later through a milestone that never moved.
As the second of five layers the organisation is read in. The formal design is recorded first, then who actually decides, delivers and is consulted, and where ownership is assumed or duplicated. Where the plan depends on a decision nobody clearly owns, the forecast marks it and names the owner to appoint.