Who decides, who is consulted, who is informed. Written down, then tested against the last ten decisions.
In the latency data, 71% of measured decision delay comes from missing authority rather than missing information. A decision with no single owner routes through everyone. Most organisations have a RACI somewhere, and almost none has one that survives contact with its own last ten decisions.
The ledger is a governance document with a test built in, so every recurring decision class gets one accountable owner, a consulted list kept deliberately short, and a named forum where the decision actually happens. Then the ledger is audited against the last ten significant decisions the organisation actually made, and wherever reality diverged from the page, either the page or the behaviour is corrected in writing before anyone signs it.
Decision classes are inventoried from minutes and approval trails. We list the decisions the organisation actually makes, not the ones the org chart implies.
Week 1The draft ledger is tested against the last ten significant decisions: who really decided, who was really consulted, how long it really took. Divergences are logged.
Week 2The reconciled ledger is signed and wired into the operating cadence: each decision class assigned to its forum, each with a named owner. Re-audited quarterly.
Week 3–4The ten-decision test is the point of the instrument. A ledger that has not been tested against actual decisions is an aspiration rather than a governance document. The quarterly re-audit was optional in the first edition and is standard now, because ledgers in the earlier applications decayed once the installation team left. The test also needs a paper trail: where decisions are made verbally and never minuted, there is nothing to audit and the instrument cannot be run as written.
Organisations where decision latency is measured and material, since the ledger closes the authority gaps the measurement exposes.
Post-acquisition seams, where two authority structures must become one before integration decisions queue.
Hospital networks, professional firms and other consensus cultures, where consultation has quietly replaced decision.
The ledger has been drawn in more than twenty engagements since 2024, most sharply where consensus cultures had priced consultation into every decision, and the first figure below is one hospital network rather than an average of anything:
The Institute stewards the ledger format. Revisions follow every tenth application review. Superseded editions remain citable, and the format has changed once since first publication.
Cite as: Markham Institute, “Decision Rights Ledger”, MKM-F-008, v1.1 (2026).