Consent, Control, and Decision Rights

Assign who may propose, decide, consent, veto, and revise the goal before conflict forces the question.

Leadership wants monitoring software on every work laptop. It's being rolled out as a done deal: no one has said who actually gets to decide this, whether employees have any voice, who checks the legal and privacy lines, or who can audit how the data gets used. The first time anyone asks "wait, who approved this?" will be during the backlash.

Consent, Control, and Decision Rights assigns authority before conflict forces the question: who may propose, who decides, who must consent, who can veto, who implements, and who can revise. The cue is a plan touching multiple people where those roles live only in assumption. Run it by answering the move question explicitly, who may decide, who must consent, and who can revise or stop this, then writing the answers down: leadership proposes, legal and privacy review constrains, workers receive a genuine voice channel, a named person holds audit authority. What changes when it works: disputes shift from raw power struggles to appeals to an agreed structure, and quiet resentment loses its fuel. Two boundaries from the spec: don't confuse having power with having moral authority, and don't demand unanimous consent where it genuinely isn't required.