Most leadership teams have never explicitly agreed on how decisions get made. They have assumptions, habits, and a rough sense of hierarchy. But when you ask each person individually who owns a given decision, you often get four different answers. The decision architecture workshop is designed to surface that disagreement and resolve it.

Who should be in the room

The workshop works best with four to twelve people. Any fewer and the map you build will not cover enough of the organisation. Any more and the conversation becomes unmanageable. The right group includes the people who make decisions and the people who are most affected by how those decisions get made. Not just the leadership team, in other words.

Day one: surfacing the real decisions

The first day is about generating an honest list of the decisions the organisation actually makes. Each participant writes down the last five decisions they were involved in, including the ones that felt slow or unclear. This produces a raw list of thirty to fifty decisions. The group then sorts them: which are genuinely strategic, which are operational, and which should not be reaching this group at all.

Day two: building and testing the map

The second day is spent building the decision map. Each decision gets assigned to one of three categories: owned outright by one role, requiring input from one other role, or requiring group agreement. The map is then tested against three real recent decisions. If the map would have produced a different outcome, the map gets revised.

What you leave with

At the end of day two, every participant has a copy of the decision map on a single A3 page. It is not a policy document. It is a working tool. Most teams pin it up somewhere visible and refer to it when a new situation arises that does not fit neatly into existing patterns.

The workshop is priced at £2,800 and runs over two consecutive days, in person. If you have a leadership team that is spending too much time in meetings without clear outcomes, this is usually the right place to start.