Sanchia Temkin Explores How Undefined Authority Fuels Decision Making Failures In Crises

When NO One Is Authorised TO Decide (by Sanchia Temkin)When authority hasn't been deliberately designed for moments of uncertainty, decisions stall

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, January 21, 2026/APO Group/ --

By Sanchia Temkin, Associate Director: Content, APO Group  (www.APO-opa.com).

Most organisational failures do not begin with poor judgement or the wrong message.

They begin earlier – at the moment a decision is required, and no one is clearly authorised to make it.

This dynamic rarely appears in calm conditions. It surfaces in a crisis: when scrutiny intensifies, time is limited, and the organisation is forced to act beyond the comfort of its usual processes. In many cases, that pressure arrives publicly, through media attention or stakeholder questioning, where hesitation is immediately visible.

Process doesn't necessarily break down. But it becomes the constraint.

Why decision-making slows in complex organisations

Large organisations are designed to distribute responsibility while centralising accountability. This architecture supports consistency, control, and risk management across markets.

It also introduces friction when decisions must be taken quickly, without full information and without consensus.

Authority often sits several layers above the point of impact. Local leaders understand context but lack mandate. Group leaders hold decision rights but lack immediacy. Functional teams optimise for their own exposure – legal, reputational, operational.

No single element of this system is dysfunctional, but delay emerges from the overlap.

When escalation replaces decision-making

Escalation frameworks are often treated as safeguards. In practice, they frequently become holding patterns.

When decision authority is not explicit, organisations default to internal consultation. Legal, risk, communications, and executive teams are engaged simultaneously. Each contribution is rational. Collectively, they slow action.

This is where communications teams often experience the pressure first – not because messaging is unclear, but because communications becomes the point at which organisational hesitation turns public.

At that stage, communication is not the problem; it's the symptom.

The uncomfortable truth about expertise

Organisations under pressure rarely lack intelligence, experience, or advice. What they lack is permission.

When authority hasn't been deliberately designed for moments of uncertainty, decisions stall. Leaders may know what to do, but no one is authorised to choose between imperfect options.

Meetings multiply. Language becomes careful. Responsibility diffuses without resolution. The organisation appears active, but nothing moves.

A question leadership teams often avoid

There’s a simple way to test whether authority actually functions:

If a high-risk issue emerged this afternoon, who could decide – without further escalation – in the first hour?

If the answer varies by function, geography, or personal relationships, authority is already fragile.

Some organisations address this by designing decision thresholds in advance: pre-agreed conditions that clarify what can be decided locally, what must be escalated, and when temporary delegation applies. The aim isn’t just speed but continuity of action when certainty is unavailable and pressure is public.

What distinguishes organisations that hold

The organisations that navigate pressure well treat authority as an operating system – deliberately designed, tested under stress, and trusted when consensus is impossible.

Most organisations believe they have done this. Very few have verified it. And the gap between authority that exists on paper and authority that holds in practice is where credibility is now made or quietly lost.

Why this matters now

In 2026, organisations are judged less by what they promise than by how decisively they act when information is incomplete and scrutiny is real-time.

Reputational damage is the outcome leaders fear most. What exposes organisations to it, time and again, is something more fundamental: discovering – often live in public – that decision-making authority is unclear, contested, or quietly assumed rather than deliberately designed.

Organisations that take this seriously do not wait for a crisis to reveal where authority collapses. They examine it in advance, stress-test it under pressure, and redesign it where it fails.

That work is uncomfortable, but preventative.

And increasingly, it’s the difference between organisations that stall and those that hold.