Elliott Jaques spent fifty years studying a deceptively simple question: why do organizations so reliably produce the experience that people are in the wrong jobs? His answer was structural. Organizations, he argued, are built on a category error — they conflate level of responsibility with level of pay, or level of seniority, or political capital, rather than with the thing that actually determines whether someone can do a job: their capacity to hold complexity over time.
Jaques called this the time span of discretion — the longest time horizon over which a person could sustain a task without requiring external check-in. A competent individual contributor might work effectively across a span of days to months. A capable manager across months to a year or two. A senior executive across years to a decade. A CEO of a major institution across a decade or more. These are not just differences of scale. They are qualitatively different cognitive modes.
The organizational problem is that titles and org charts do not reliably map onto these levels. A person can hold a VP title while operating at the cognitive complexity of a senior manager — or, more commonly in the organizations I work with, a person can be doing VP-level cognitive work while carrying a director title and the compensation and authority that comes with it. The mismatch generates frustration that looks like a personality problem or a motivation problem but is actually a structural one.
The more consequential version of the same mismatch is at the governance level of professional services firms. Authority in those environments is rarely held where the org chart says it is. Senior partners carry veto power they do not formally have. Founding generation leaders retain influence over decisions they have nominally delegated. The organization operates by a set of authority relationships that are real and consequential but not documented — and when those shadow structures diverge far enough from the formal ones, governance loops. Decisions that should be made aren't, or are unmade after they're made, or require informal ratification from people whose authority is not visible on any chart.
The work of mapping this honestly — not to embarrass anyone, but to see clearly why certain decisions keep not getting made — is often the prerequisite for any other organizational intervention. You cannot fix a succession problem or a leadership transition problem without first understanding where authority actually lives.