Governance frameworks give organisations structural reassurance. They define decision rights, describe how responsibility is distributed and explain where accountability is supposed to sit.

Yet the lived experience of decision making inside organisations often looks very different from how it has been documented.

Decisions begin to slow. Consultation widens across stakeholders. Senior leaders find themselves revisiting matters that were supposedly already delegated elsewhere.

When a consequential decision arrives, the place where responsibility actually settles can be much harder to define than the governance documentation suggests it should be.

This commentary explores why decision authority cannot be installed by policy alone, and why governance frameworks can describe authority clearly while organisations still struggle to exercise it in practice.