What's wrong with decision-making at the top?

Many companies try to make decisions "at the top" instead of delegating that authority lower down the ladder. In this sense they hope to remain "in control" of what is decided.

Here's the problem - bandwidth. Top management only has so much they can deal with in a given day. So, rather than trying to put in 185 hour days, management does two things.

First, it puts out visible signals that management is overwhelmed, and please stop bringing problems to our attention unless you already know the answer. That cuts out a lot of this flow of information about process defects and makes life look a lot better.

Then, management decides it "prioritize" - which often means that a small subset of the problems that have made it to their desks actually will be dealt with today, and the rest will have to wait to "some other day."

So, management attempts to retain "control" of the process by suppressing news about most things going wrong, and avoiding dealing with most problems at all, at least today.

True, some problems will be dealt with. The serious question is, what are the costs and what are the benefits of this approach. How high are the actual costs of all those problems that are not being dealt with, and the costs of everything downstream that has stopped in its tracks waiting for resolution of the identified problem? These "opportunity costs" are often very high and very real.

Theory Y, bottom-up management, distributed leadership, and lean manufacturing all push the responsibility for problem-solving out of the corporate suite. This does involve letting go of the "control" that is gained by making these decisions, but includes getting hold of the "control" that comes from some kind of solution to the problem being instituted, instead of no solution at all for another day.

In many cases, most of the problems can be resolved at lower levels than upper management -- the ship isn't as responsive to the helm, but on the other hand it has stopped taking on water and no longer feels like it is about to capsize, and that funny noise has stopped -- so, there IS a ship left that can be steered, somewhat.

I fret about the

FEMA national incident management plan

because it is largely a plan to change all the reporting responsibilities and send issues to the "top" for resolution. Bandwidth, I think, will be the issue. A single large issue can claim 100% of the top executives' attention, closeting them in secret somewhere, while the phones go unaswered on every other issue that is, as requested, carefully flowing up the chain of command. That simply is unworkable in a large-scale emergency which is, well, when it is needed the most.

We have this long-standing heritage in this country of success based on top-down management and it is hard to let go and "shift the paradigm" to empowered employees making most decisions. In Katrina, it was the US Coast Guard that was most effective at rescuing people, becuase they had authority already delegated to each ship captain to do whatever made sense in an emergency.

Interesting idea.