The Situation
A global financial services organisation was eighteen months into a major regulatory compliance transformation — one of the largest programmes in the firm’s recent history, with a hard regulatory deadline and significant reputational exposure. The programme was behind schedule. The stated diagnosis from internal programme management was resource constraints and scope complexity. The actual problem was different. Decision authority at the Executive Committee level had become unclear in ways that were paralysing the programme without anyone being able to name precisely what was happening.
The Diagnostic
The Leadership Clarity Diagnostic identified the structural condition within the first two weeks. The firm had undergone two significant leadership changes and a strategic repositioning in the three years preceding the transformation programme. The operating model documentation had not kept pace. The programme’s escalation structure was routing decisions to an authority configuration that had drifted from the one documented. Different ExCo members held genuinely different beliefs about who owned what.
The Architecture
RT’s governance architecture work addressed the structural condition directly. Beginning with the ExCo’s current composition and authority configuration — not the documented one — RT designed a decision authority framework specific to the transformation programme’s decision categories. The framework was specific, named, and owned. Each ExCo member understood their authority and its limits. The programme board understood what it could decide without escalation.
Decision authority made explicit and owned across all programme-critical categories within six weeks of architecture delivery
ExCo escalation volume reduced by approximately 70% within the first quarter following implementation
ExCo escalation volume reduced by approximately 70% within the first quarter following implementation
Governance architecture adopted as the basis for the firm’s ongoing operating model redesign beyond the programme
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