Who owns the decision? The science of empowered teams

Most government software teams have an org chart. Far fewer have clarity on who's accountable for what and who holds the authority to match.

That gap is where dysfunction lives. Decisions stall in consensus. Engineers carry responsibility they have no power to act on. Product, design, and engineering blur together until everyone weighs in and no one owns the call.

Real empowerment is a structure: accountabilities and authorities, deliberately matched, role by role.

In this Mission O/S Live, Rise8 VP of Enablement Adam Furtado and Rise8 Platform Engineering Enablement Lead Matt Pacione sit down with Matthew K. Parker—author and Senior Adviser to the Maryland Digital Service—to unpack the science of organizational design and a question every delivery team wrestles with: how do you give people real ownership without falling into the consensus trap?

What they'll cover:

• How matching authority to accountability keeps government delivery from defaulting to either gridlock or chaos
• How to maintain a structure of distributed ownership inside hierarchical, compliance-heavy orgs with balanced teams
• What program leaders and engineering directors should and shouldn't own
• Why empowered roles and aligned autonomy matter for retaining scarce technical talent in government
  

If you lead, build, or deliver inside a government software org—and you want a team structure rooted in science, not just good intentions—you won't want to miss this one.

Matt Pacione (00:31):

Hey everyone. Welcome to Mission OS Live. My name is Matt Pacione. I'm Rise8's platform engineering enablement lead and I'm thrilled to be joined by Rise8s, Vice President of Enablement, Adam Furtado. And our guest today, Matt Parker, thanks for joining us guys.

Matt Pacione (00:46):

Matt’s the author of Radical Enterprise and he currently serves as a senior advisor to the Maryland Digital Service. He spent years thinking hard about how software teams should actually be structured, how do they work together and what's their place in the organization. His work specifically digs into the science of organizational design, not necessarily the org chart, but the deeper questions of how you match accountability to authority so that teams can actually own their own work. His core argument is one that we keep running into the government delivery. The real issue is that empowerment is a structure and today we're going to get into that structure and what that looks like, why it's so hard to build that inside the government and what it takes to hold it all together. Matt and Adam, glad to have you both here. I'm excited to dive in.

Matt K. Parker (01:35):

Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm keen on it. Let's go.

Matt Pacione (01:38):

Let's do it. Well, we work with and in the government and we see hierarchy, we see the org chart. You just have to see it. It's there all over the place. We have people when you look at it that are above us that are below us and the very language speaks of this hierarchy and encourages certain beliefs and behaviors that are in place. And the government is no exception. Almost every government team has that org chart. Why does that tell us so little about how decisions are actually made? Matt, in your research and experience, what have you found?

Matt K. Parker (02:13):

Yeah, great question. This answer, by the way, isn't just something I found in government. I found it in organizations all over the world, for- profit companies, nonprofit organizations, government organizations. I think why the org chart is misleading is because there's a very simple question that you can ask or a couple of questions that you can ask everyone and that very few people in most organizations have a clear answer to. Ask them what are they accountable for and what are their decision making rights? In other words, ask them, "Your role that you're playing succeeds when what becomes true and what is your domain of authority in relation to that success statement?" These are very basic questions and they're very simple questions, but they are surprisingly hard for most people to answer. People are in most companies, in most organizations, in the government too, unclear on what exactly success is for them, how to measure it, and what rights they have, decision-making rights they have to get there to actually pursue that.

(03:34):

And the reason that's so problematic is because when those two things are out of balance in some kind of way, shape or form, dysfunction ensues. Because it's not just a you problem to the extent that you are either unclear about the answer to either of those two questions or you're clear about them, but they add up to something that amounts to disempowerment or tyranny. It affects not just you, but everyone around you, everyone you need to collaborate with. The most common situation though is that there's just simply a lack of clarity there on either of those two questions. And that generates a tremendous amount of confusion and dysfunction and honestly, a lot of toxic behavior that people normally wouldn't engage in, but will in an information vacuum and a decision-making vacuum in a goal vacuum.

Matt Pacione (04:29):

Yeah, no, you and I met. I had the privilege of Matt being a mentor and a coach to me last year and it was really good. And I remember you asking me that question is, what are you accountable for? What authority do you have? And it really was a very difficult question for me to answer. Adam, as being the vice president of enablement and having a large team, what are things that you keep in mind when you talk about authority and accountability?

Adam Furtado (04:57):

I think one of the important things to think about is, and this is where I think the government might be unique to corporate America, Matt. I'd love to know if you agree here is that where the authority lives is not usually where the context to make that decision effectively is in government especially. The government is sort of a unique thing. The United States federal government's the world's largest bureaucracy and I like to argue that the bureaucracy is made to withstand change. So the entire point of the structure that the government is created upon is to ensure that as we have this constant rotation of changing administrations and military PCSs and leadership transitions, the system itself can withstand that chaos and still function in the way that it needs to going forward. I think it's a feature and not a bug. So we end up constantly in these scenarios where leaders are in positions where they don't really hold the necessary context to be the person making the best decision at any given time, even though the organizational structure points to that.

(06:09):

So I think that's sort of the larger problem we're in. It's like, yeah, we have to be clear about where the authority lies and those sorts of things, but generally the authority lies with somebody who actually doesn't have the necessary context to make those sorts of decisions. So it leads to this level of exhaustion everywhere below you because there's just these mental gymnastics that have to happen for all of the people within that organization to try to fill in gaps where ambiguity lies. And now we have people throughout a structure filling in their own gaps based on their assumptions and their own mental models and moving forward confidently where they feel comfortable to, but the world is slightly different for everybody. So it just kind of builds upon itself and you don't really have the ability to get to this clear endpoint that you really want to.

Matt K. Parker (06:58):

Yeah. Just to respond to that, well, certainly what you're saying in government about the disconnect between who has the information and who has the authority is true, but I don't think it's unique to government. The way it manifests in government, I'll grant you, can be different from the way it manifests in other organizations around the world, but that disconnect is actually just the norm. It is very normal inside most organizations for people who are on the front lines getting the information that is necessary to make decisions, not be empowered to then act on that information. They have to give it to somebody else either because there is clarity that they're disempowered or there's a lack of clarity about who gets to own what kind of decision and therefore everything has to be shared infinitely, everything has to be debated infinitely. People are just dragged down by consensus and other problems or eventually waiting for somebody far away from the problem to make a decision and then for other people to be held accountable for it.

(08:02):

That is such a disempowering place to be. It's a really disengaging place to be and it's the reason why Gartner year after year after year studying disengagement in the workforce around the world discovers incredible levels of it, passive and active disengagement all over the world and all kinds of organizations, small and large, a lot of it comes back to this fundamental lack of empowerment, fundamental lack of disconnect between authority and information.

Matt Pacione (08:33):

When I first became a parent, I realized really quickly that demands and duty of like, "Go clean your room, go do this, go do that, " versus pulling in that desire of, "Hey, you could clean your room and it would be good because you wouldn't get those little cockroaches that come visit you at night." That reason that why behind it, you give them the power to say, "Hey, there's actually a good choice in what you're giving me. " Matt, you talk about four imperatives in your book, specifically team autonomy is what I would like to move into now because I think it has to do with this. We have these teams that are in place that don't feel empowered.What would you encourage those teams and organizations that might want to be more autonomous and the reasons why they would do that?

Matt K. Parker (09:23):

Yeah. Okay. Well, yeah, autonomy is one of those sort of fundamental human needs. It's a psychological need because humans are a special kind of animal. We've recently evolved this thing called metacognition and it leads us to have these other needs besides just, I need to be safe and I need to have some kind of shelter and I need food and I need water. We also need security, we need autonomy, we need fairness, we need esteem, we need trust, we need belongingness. Without those things, it's a real problem. Autonomy is really the definition of autonomy is being able to make decisions in pursuit of an outcome. You are autonomous to the extent that you can autonomously move towards a goal and you can make decisions as you go. To the extent that you can't make those decisions, you are not autonomous. That's what we're really talking about.

(10:15):

And without that, all kinds of problems crop up. And so teams that want to be to gain more autonomy, what they first have to sort out is an alignment inside the organization that gives that team a mission. What is the actual mission that we are on? What does success mean for our team? And can we get to the point where the organization agrees on that mission in some way, shape or form and empowers us to autonomously pursue it? Can we come to that kind of agreement? And that's actually a really hard thing to do in most organizations because of the lack of clarity that I just discussed. To the extent that people aren't clear on roles, authorities, accountabilities, it makes it much, much harder to have this conversation and it makes it take longer and it makes it fragile once you have it. So focusing on roles, authorities, and accountabilities can also be a fantastic way and a complimentary way to get to better autonomy, not just within your team, but within the organization as a whole.

(11:23):

Autonomy is also something that's fractal, meaning that what you want is aligned autonomy throughout the organization and how that manifests on a software development team might be different from how it manifests outside the team or in different parts of the organization, but the fundamentals of it are the same. You want this sort of alignment on outcomes and the autonomy to get there. Yeah, I'll stop there because I don't know where you want to go with that, but I'm happy to dive into any of that.

Matt Pacione (11:52):

No, that's good. I appreciate that. Adam, from a leadership perspective, what do you have to say on helping teams become more autonomous and helping them actually have the authority to do what it needs to be done?

Adam Furtado (12:04):

Yeah, I think what Matt hit at the end there is sort of where I wanted to go. I think if you were a leader listening to this, it isn't really as easy as you just like, "Okay, I'm going to let them be autonomous now. I'm going to go tell them all, Hey, you guys are autonomous, go do your thing and things will take root." I think working in outcome oriented ways is sort of a cheat code here that we can utilize and particularly thinking about the government aspect of this. In the corporate world, we always have bottom line revenue goals to align after that are just kind of inherently there, that even in the absence of some sort of really strong strategic communication coming from your executive team, you kind of always know what the enduring goal is of the team. Government makes that really difficult because it's about impact and we use different language depending on the agency and what that comes to look like.

(12:55):

And I think for impact-based organizations, working in outcome-oriented ways can kind of be a bit of a translator for us. I'll tell you that when I was deciding what I wanted to do with my career last year and I was talking to our CEO here, Brian, about joining Rise eight, he talked a lot about we work in outcome oriented ways, here's the way that we think about the world. And I kind of took it a bit like a little bit of an eye roll short with some platitudes. Everybody wants to work in outcome oriented ways. And then when I joined the company and went to our first executive offsite, we spent maybe 5% of the time talking about revenue goals and 95% of the time talking about how we as an executive team and as a company can put more mission outcomes into production. And that was with the head of marketing and human resources and sales.

(13:41):

We were having this same conversation about how do we get delivery teams to more effectively put outcomes into production for clients. And it kind of helps this whole conversation because each of the people in that room are thinking about, okay, what constraint can I alleviate that allows me to change this one thing we are all inherently aligned upon to be able to deliver as a team? And I think it helps navigate some of that ambiguity and lack of clarity in human language and action by having this kind of underpinned in everything that we do here. So I've kind of seen that work, I guess here within this company.

Matt K. Parker (14:21):

Matt, can I respond to that real quick?

Matt Pacione (14:23):

Yeah, of course. Go ahead.

Matt K. Parker (14:26):

What you just described, Adam, is fantastic because it's very clear that Rise8 knows ultimately what it's trying to achieve. Rise8 succeeds to the extent that the teams that they're deploying with and into the government to work alongside government agencies and organizations, they succeed to the extent that they're actually able to iteratively deliver value for the people that those agencies serve. And so if the whole organization is thinking about how do we get there, what are all the things we can be doing to better deliver on that mission? That's fantastic. The one trick is that as an organization grows and grows and grows and grows and grows, that conversation becomes harder and harder and harder to have. And that's just a fact. And the trap is to not adapt to that fact. The trap is to say we are all still going to maintain very clear complete knowledge of what's going on in the company at all these levels and we're going to make it all align.

(15:34):

Discursive alignment doesn't scale to the extent that you are all trying to figure out a thing together, the more and more minds you have involved in that process, the harder it becomes. And so I think what you want to create is an organization that behaves more like a market economy. In a market economy, you have many different actors working across a very large supply chain and it leads to outcomes. But the truth is many people at different points of that supply chain have no idea about how everything works or how it all fits together. That's because they don't have to and that's a benefit. That's a huge benefit. There is a reason centralized planning economies failed in the 20th century and it's because knowledge and our ability to grasp knowledge and to be able to effectively deal with it does not scale very well the larger the society or the organization becomes.

(16:38):

And so what you want to be able to do is unlock value by creating decentralization and knowledge, but alignment through ultimately flexible dynamic mechanisms. So the reason it works in the market is because I can go to somebody and buy something from them and I don't have to know what they do behind that interface. Maybe behind that interface, they buy something from somebody else and then give it back to me. Maybe they buy many things and put them together and give it back to me and they don't have to know exactly what I'm going to do with it either. I'm going to take my thing and go deliver on my mission. That's the same kind of thing you want inside in a company, inside an organization and that's what we need in government too. We need the ability for everyone to be aligned without everyone having to know everything.

(17:25):

So anyways, that's what came to mind as you were talking, Adam.

Matt Pacione (17:29):

I appreciate that. One of the things as we scale and as we get larger and larger, the natural inclination of a lot of people is we just need managers. We need to bring in people. We need to have this org chart in place. And one of your imperatives is in your book, Managerial Devolution, making sure that teams become more autonomous and that you actually structure your organization to be more empowering From your research and your investigation and your experience, what have you seen? What are some steps that teams can actually do to devolve their managerial structure?

Matt K. Parker (18:06):

Yeah. So a devolution in management isn't the same thing as an increase in, let's say, everyone's authority to do whatever they want. So I think this is the fundamental thing that I have come to grasp over years of both experience and research is that an empowered organization, one in which you find a great deal of autonomy is also one in which you find a good deal of rigor and discipline around who owns what. To the extent that you get really good at deciding who owns what, you get really good at creating an organization that can sense and respond in really dynamic ways.

(18:59):

Let's start with a team itself. Talk about a balanced team of PM product design and engineering. If we can get really clear on who owns what on that team, a lot of stuff becomes both very efficient and very effective. The collaboration within that team gets supercharged. And I think this is a misnomer that many people have. I think many people think that the ideal software team is one in which everyone sort of drives forward through consensus or something. And that's not what actually the science says is effective. In fact, that can be really disempowering in some ways because then you feel like the decisions that you should be able to make are being vetoed by other people who aren't going to have to deal with the consequence of it. So if you just take the balanced team example in and of itself, I think it's easy to understand PM has a mission, design has a mission, and engineering has a mission.

(19:54):

Those three missions are complimentary, but they are not the same exact mission and they have a set of discreet decision making rights that need to go with them. The product manager needs decision making rights around the backlog. They need to be able to decide and prioritize what is the next most important thing for this team to work on at this time based on everything I'm hearing from design, from engineering, from our stakeholders, from our clients, from our users, they're this gathering ground and they're making that decision. They're like a navigator on a ship navigating towards a destination through uncertain waters. They're taking in the information from lots of different places and they're deciding what is the next step. But engineers have a mission. They're trying to create quality software, software that doesn't just meet the needs as spelled out in a user story on a backlog, but also delivers quality, secure, reliable performance, scalable software, releasable software.

(20:51):

There's all kinds of basic non-functional attributes that engineers have to own to be considered good at their jobs, to be doing a good job. And they have a set of decision making rights that they own. They decide on the code and the infrastructure and if they don't have those kinds of decision making rights, if there's somebody outside the team that's telling them, "Oh, you have to code it in this specific way or you have to use this specific platform or this specific software," you can get into really bad situations where the team who knows what needs to happen can't make effective decisions because they don't have that power. So design has a corresponding set of decision making rights and a mission. So anyways, I'm just trying to say that what you want is clarity around all that so that when you come to co-labor together, it actually adds up to something greater than the sum of its parts and that's what we strive for.

(21:41):

And the same thing would be true fractally. Outside the team, you want a product leader, for example, piecing together many different pieces of a whole product suite and creating coherency within it and aligning outcomes across many different products so that the whole suite of products is coherent. And that is a set of decision-making rights too. And that implies that they get to create the outcome that they are hiring each team to go deliver at any given time, but the team itself gets to decide on how to get there. That's the aligned autonomy, et cetera, et cetera. So what you end up with instead of a hierarchical org chart in which people higher up have the authority to veto everyone underneath them, what you end up with is something much more like a market in which everyone is linked together and some ways based on buying and selling things, even though they're probably not passing money back and forth between themselves.

(22:36):

A product leader buys outcomes from a team and a team delivers those outcomes. The product leader doesn't get to tell them how to go deliver those outcomes. The team gets to decide how to get there because they're the ones on the front lines delivering that. They're the ones with the information and we had to push the authority down to that information. Anyways, I'll stop there.

Adam Furtado (22:58):

A quick note then I have a question for you, I think I really liked what you were saying there around

(23:06):

Organizations who work in this way need to be more disciplined about how these things are decided and documented and that sort of thing. I'll tell you that when I came into our organization, we don't have managers and that sort of thing. And this is very hard for me because I was in the military most of my career or working within the government most of my career and it's kind of bred into you. And the whole self-management concept coupled with the structure and operating model investment that we make here has really been valuable to make that possible. I wanted to ask you, the balanced team model is maybe a good framing, but I'm curious about how you think about dealing with natural evolution within these systems. So one thing I've been struggling with from a balanced team model perspective is like the natural change that's occurring right now with AI being in the mix.

(23:59):

We're starting to see within our teams all of a sudden those roles that were pretty clear pattern for most of us for 10 years are starting to blend sort of all around us right now with designers are now shipping software themselves, engineers are doing product work themselves. And I was trying to think of like if it was a restaurant kitchen, another place that we've built all these kind of patterns that we utilize all the time, if we woke up one day and bread started rising 90% faster and the carrots peeled themselves, what would change in the way that we worked in this sort of orchestra and the misenplace of it all or whatever? So I'm curious of how, as you think about these things, as patterns evolve around us, how do you go back and then, I don't know, re-engineer those sorts of things to make sure that we can evolve with it?

Matt K. Parker (24:49):

Right. Yeah, that's a great question. So there are a number of different self-management frameworks out there that try to build the concept of evolution, role evolution directly into the framework itself. Alocracy is probably the most well-known example of that, but it's not the only one I think what you really ... Okay, so this is a litle bit tricky, right? Because you're talking about disciplines and craft, like in the balanced team example, you're talking about engineering craft, design craft, product craft, some of which AI can more or less, let's say, absorb some of which it can't because so much of what a team is doing is sense making. Knowledge work is an inherently creative discipline. We are forever trying to make sense of the world and that involves not just algorithms, it involves intuition, it involves creativity, involves eureka moments. And AI is only going to do so much within that world, but there are pieces of it that the human, at least the AI we have today, can't replace.

(26:08):

And so I think you want to be very careful and clear about as we are creating a world in which a designer can ship code. A designer who wasn't already also an engineer can now ship code by using AI, for example, that we don't do this in such a way that we eliminate the creative sense making piece of it. I think it's totally fair to begin to rethink all of the roles that we have as technology comes along and changes what's possible, the art of the possible. But if we lose sight of some of the underlying principles and values and goals that were built up through that craft, then we might throw the baby out with the bath water and that would be a very dangerous place to be. I mean, it would be a very sad place to be too, I think for many people because you would be robbing people of maybe the thing about the craft that they love most.

(27:05):

And we see that I think every day nowadays right there. I've talked to many engineers who feel like they've lost something. I talk to many more who feel like they haven't, so it's not universal. I think there are all kinds of different experiences and reactions happening right now, but I think how varied this is playing out and rolling out too accounts for a lot of those varied experiences as well. And it's incumbent upon all of us to step back and reflect on what is essential and what is meaningful and how do we preserve that? Because once you take the meaning out of the work, everything else is going to go. There is no world in which humans do good jobs at work that they find meaningless. So don't let that happen.

Adam Furtado (27:53):

I do wonder too if the empowerment part of the conversation ties in here where if you're more empowered within your team, you have the freedom to think about the meta of it, like how this team works and how it might evolve. If you're not empowered to in the day-to-day work, you're not even going to feel the freedom to even think about that evolution itself.

Matt K. Parker (28:18):

Not just the freedom, you might not feel safe to talk about it. In disempowered organizations, you also almost always find very low levels of psychological safety, which really means what you find are high levels of defensive reasoning, high levels of inner subjective environments in which people are essentially engaging in all these underlying tasks at psychological routines about winning and not losing, pretending that everything is normal while actually trying to suppress negative emotions. And what it adds up to is a world in which people are no longer making informed decisions because the conversation that would've allowed the information to come out has been suppressed. So what you actually want to find is a world in which people are doing a lot of productive reasoning, creating informed choice by being able to share what they think and why they think it, unveiling the hidden chain of inferences and biases that go into all of our thinking, because that's how human brains work to the extent that we are in worlds in which it is safe and normal to do that, I think this and I think this is why I think it.

(29:25):

And yeah, other people can say, "Well, I don't think that at all. And I think this other thing." To the extent that that's just a normal professional interaction, great. The problem is most organizations make that a very dangerous interaction, "Oh, you don't believe what I believe?" Well, I guess you're not getting that bonus. I guess maybe you're not up for that promotion anymore. Not that it ever comes out that explicitly, but that's the danger, that it's this sort of tyranny that people fear. So yeah, I think you're absolutely right. An empowered team is absolutely empowered not only to figure out How do we get to the outcome, but how do we organize ourselves to get to the outcome? And I think if you have highly empowered teams of craftspeople, then they will naturally evolve the way they work in a way that is healthy, that is not toxic, and that adjusts based on ... Because they're going to try things and fail at them too, not just in terms of the software itself, but in how they organize themselves to get there.

(30:23):

Giving them the freedom to do that as co-equal professionals is essential.

Matt Pacione (30:31):

Well, Matt and Adam, thank you for joining us. This has been a great conversation today. We're wrapping up on time here. I really appreciate you being here. If you're watching and this has resonated with you, definitely encourage you to go find Matt Parker on LinkedIn, pick up his book, The Radical Enterprise. Highly recommend it. We'll drop a link here in the comments. If you haven't checked out our Mission OS series as well, it breaks down what it actually takes to ship outcomes into production inside the government, empowering individuals and teams to do just that. One more thing as well before we go, we do have Prodacity coming up August 25th through 27th in Nashville. If you want to spend a few days to join people together and like mind as we're trying to ship outcomes to production inside the government, come join us. We'll leave a comment about how to register for that.

(31:22):

But want to thank you all for your time today. Thanks everybody for watching and we'll see you next time.

Matt K. Parker (31:28):

Thanks for having me.

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