Today’s Executive Briefing: Who actually authorized your last five decisions?

Deloitte's organizational design practice describes formal and informal authority as equally weighted systems operating inside every company. Their consultants map both because the org chart alone does not explain how decisions actually get made (Deloitte, Organization Design Consulting, 2025). McKinsey's performance management research found that company leaders themselves identify the presence of informal "shadow" systems and structural misalignment as persistent challenges undermining how their organizations function (McKinsey, May 2024).

Two systems. One on the org chart. One running underneath it.

Formal authority gets documented. Someone is named to a role. The reporting lines are published. Authorization protocols clarify who is supposed to decide what.

Then something needs to happen fast. A vendor relationship needs saving. A board member needs managing. An operations problem needs solving before it reaches the quarterly review. The person who handles it is almost never the person the org chart designated.

That is informal authority filling a structural gap. It routes around bottlenecks, compensates for vacancies, absorbs work the formal architecture cannot hold. In organizations where formal structure is well-designed and regularly maintained, informal authority operates at the margins. In organizations where nobody built architecture for the second system, informal authority becomes the operating system without anyone choosing to install it.

The Roman Republic governed through formal institutional authority for centuries. The Senate held legal power. Magistrates held constitutional roles. Documented processes existed for authorization, deliberation, and decision. What the system never built was architecture to read the informal authority accumulating inside its military commands. Generals gathered loyalty, resources, and operational independence the formal system had no instrument to see. By the time the divergence surfaced, the informal system had already replaced the formal one as the structure the Republic actually ran on.

I was explaining this to someone whose strategy kept stalling between the leadership team and the rest of the organization. I told them that making strategy real means making sure everyone understands it, can apply it, knows how to act on it, and more importantly, when to adjust it. Measuring it is self-explanatory. We measure what matters; even when we measure nothing, that is a measurement. A strategy is a figment of imagination unless it is measured for performance and risk. And making it matter means building the decision models, accountability structures, cultural integrations, systems alignment, and stakeholder engagement that give it boundaries, flow, pattern, and tracking. When it matters, it is understood, monitored, lived, and nurtured. Every word in that sequence names a layer of authority architecture. Where formal and informal authority align, those layers hold. Where they diverge, the organization runs on whichever system is faster, more trusted, or more available.

The person with the most authority in the room and the person making the actual decision have been different people in most organizations for longer than anyone has named it. That gap is the absence of architecture for something the organization depends on every day.

A confidential engagement with a legacy nonprofit surfaced six categories of structural breakdown simultaneously—leadership vacuum, vendor disarray, HR noncompliance, financial concealment, governance drift, strategic denial. Every one sustained by a system where informal authority held the organization together while formal authority went unexercised. The informal holder was more effective than the formal structure. The organization adapted around what worked. Nobody built the instrument to read where the formal system had stopped functioning, and the informal system had taken over.

Tool: The Informal Authority Read

Pull five decisions from the last ninety days. For each one, answer two questions.

First, who should have authorized this decision according to your org chart?

Second, who actually did?

Write both names. Five decisions, two names each. Where the names match, formal architecture is functioning for that decision. Where they diverge, informal authority is operating.

The divergence pattern is the read. Which decisions does your formal structure actually govern, and which ones did it hand off without anyone naming the handoff?

© 2026 Lauren Carter. This instrument is proprietary. For individual diagnostic use only. Reproduction, adaptation, or redistribution in any form requires prior written permission from Lauren Carter.

Lens Question

If you mapped who actually made your last ten decisions against who your org chart says should have, what would the gap tell you?

That gap has a structure. If you want to know where informal authority is running your operating system and what it would take to make the architecture visible, the Rapid Executive Diagnostic gets you there in ninety minutes.

— Lauren

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