Toolkit

The Decision-Rights Map

The Decision-Rights Map records who may decide what, who may approve, who may override, and who may stop the work entirely. Agents make this map urgent: an agent can inherit a permission, but it cannot inherit a right — rights belong to named people, and this map names them.

The template

One page, filled in with the people who do the work.

Print this page, or copy the prompts into your own sheet. Nothing here needs a tool, an engineer or a licence — only the people who already know the answers, in one room, writing them down in the same place.

  1. For the work mapped in the Work Map: list every decision it contains, however small.

  2. For each decision: who may take it; who may approve it; who may override it; who may stop the work entirely.

  3. Which of these rights are genuinely exercised today, and which exist only on paper.

  4. Which decisions currently have no named holder at all — the blank cells are the finding.

  5. For any agent involved: which level it works at — human-led, augmented, delegated with approval, or bounded autonomous — decided per decision, never per tool.

Role lenses

The same map, read six ways.

One sheet serves the whole team, but each Transformer role is looking for something different on it. Take the line for your role and mark that first.

  • Owner

    which approvals are genuinely yours, and which you only rubber-stamp.

  • Organizer

    who may re-sequence work when priorities collide.

  • Creator

    who chooses among variants, and on what stated criteria.

  • Implementer

    who authorises a change to a production system.

  • Tester

    who may block a release, and what evidence unblocks it.

  • Maintainer

    who may stop the running system, and how fast.

The method

Where this map is worked through.

Where this map appears

The briefings that put it to work.

The other maps, and the two working sheets that ship as printable PDFs, are in the Toolkit.