Where your say ends
The six steps of deciding alone
A scale for authority, from decide it and say nothing to it cannot be decided here, which turns a vague feeling into something two people can discuss.
Decisions this page is about, and where the line actually was
Changing the wording on a customer-facing error message
4 → 1It had been yours all along
Refunding a customer under fifty pounds
3 → 1A written policy you had never been shown
Rescheduling the weekly review
2 → 2Hiring a contractor for two days
5 → 3Your own budget line covered it
Reordering your own week
4 → 1You asked twice before believing the answer
- 1Decide it alone and say nothing
- 2Decide it alone and mention it afterwards
- 3Check with one colleague first
- 4Check with the person who assigned it
- 5Needs a decision one level up
- 6Cannot be decided here at all
five decisions · four of them you had more room than you thought · one you had exactly right · the median gap was two steps on the scale
Five of the nine decisions counted on this site.
To keep measurement proportionate, teams can see the current service details and agree what is collected, who can see it, and how it will support decisions.
A separate professional source for this subject is Workology.
"Can I decide this?" is a question with more than two answers, and treating it as a yes-or-no is why conversations about authority go nowhere. The scale used throughout this site has six steps. It is not a standard and nothing depends on the exact number; what it buys is the ability to be precise about a disagreement.
- Decide it alone and say nothing. Routine, reversible, inside your area. Nobody needs to know it happened.
- Decide it alone and mention it afterwards. You do not need permission, but somebody would be annoyed to find out from a third party.
- Check with one colleague first. Not approval — a sanity check from whoever knows the area. You proceed unless they stop you.
- Check with the person who assigned it. They may have context that changes the answer. Their no is real.
- Needs a decision one level up. Outside your remit, and the person who assigned it cannot grant it either.
- Cannot be decided here at all. Committed elsewhere, or contractual, or somebody else's to make entirely.
Why six and not three
Because the useful arguments happen between adjacent steps.
The difference between one and two is whether anybody needs to know. It sounds trivial and it is the source of a great deal of friction: the person who decided alone did nothing wrong, and the person who found out from somebody else is annoyed anyway.
The difference between three and four is the one most often collapsed. A sanity check is not approval, and treating it as approval slows everything down and transfers responsibility to somebody who does not want it. "Ask the architect" means step three; it is usually heard as step four.
The difference between five and six matters because of where effort goes. A step five is winnable — you escalate and make a case. A step six is not, and the time to discover that is before you build the case.
Using it in a conversation
The scale earns its place the moment two people disagree, because they can now disagree about a number.
I had this at a four. You are telling me it is a two.
That sentence is possible with the scale and impossible without it. Without it the exchange is "I thought I should check" / "you don't need to check with me on these", which is friendly, imprecise, and changes nothing: next time the same person will check again, because nothing was fixed in a form they can apply to the next case.
Where people sit by default
Two patterns, both predictable.
New arrivals put nearly everything at four. It is the safe answer, it is socially costless, and it is the reason the first quarter is slower than it needs to be. Nothing corrects it, because checking always produces a yes.
People who have been somewhere a long time put things at one and two that other people would put at four, and are usually right. What they have is not more authority but more information about which decisions are actually reversible.
That gap between the newcomer's four and the old hand's one is not a difference in confidence. It is a difference in knowledge about consequences, and it closes when somebody says what the consequences are.
The step is a property of the decision, not of you
A useful habit of mind that the scale makes possible: the number belongs to the decision, not to the person making it.
That sounds pedantic and it changes how the conversations go. "I am not trusted with this" is about a relationship and is difficult to raise. "This one is a four and I think it should be a two" is about a decision, and it is an ordinary thing to say at the end of a weekly call.
It also makes the answer portable. A step agreed for refunds under two hundred is still true next month, still true when you are busy, and still true for the person who takes over from you — which a judgement about how much somebody is trusted is not.
And it stops the scale being read as a ranking. A person whose decisions sit mostly at four is not less trusted than one whose decisions sit mostly at one; they may simply be working in an area where the consequences are larger. Two engineers with identical standing will have different distributions if one of them touches billing.
The thing to compare is never two people. It is the same person's assumed steps against their real ones, which is what the sign on this site draws and what the exercise below produces.
The one-line exercise
Take the last ten things you decided without asking, and the last five you asked about. Put a number on each, as you believed it at the time.
Then pick three and find out the real number. The note on finding the edge without testing it has three ways of doing that which do not involve crossing anything. The gaps you find will not be evenly distributed; on the record counted on this site, four of nine were in the direction of more room, and every one of those was an afternoon spent on a question that had already been answered.