Delegation of Authority
Authority matrices and approval chains that are explicit, auditable and enforced — not tribal knowledge held by whoever has been here longest.
The problem
Ask most organizations who is allowed to approve a given commitment above a given value, and the answer arrives slowly, with caveats, and sometimes differently depending on who you ask. The authority exists — it is simply distributed across a board resolution, a finance manual, an ERP configuration and institutional memory.
That ambiguity is expensive in ordinary times and dangerous in unusual ones. Decisions stall while people establish who can sign. Or they do not stall, and something gets approved by someone who was never mandated to approve it.
It becomes acute the moment decisions are automated. A system cannot infer authority it was never given. Delegation of Authority is the first thing an AI-native operating model needs made explicit, and the most commonly missing.
What we deliver
- A complete authority matrix covering financial, operational and HR decision rights
- Approval chains and escalation paths defined by role rather than by individual
- Alignment between board mandate, delegated authority and system configuration
- Thresholds set deliberately rather than inherited from a previous structure
- Operational DoAs that reach below executive level to where decisions are really made
- An auditable record of who held which authority on any given date
Signs you need this
- Two people give different answers about who can approve the same commitment
- Approvals stall while someone establishes who has the mandate
- The DoA document and the ERP approval configuration disagree
- Authority is described at executive level but undefined in day-to-day operations
Authority is modelled in Mosaic against the roles, processes and policies it applies to, so a delegation change shows every process, approval chain and control it will affect before it is made.
See the platformRelated disciplines
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