# The Decision Rights Map — Debrief

> Twelve questions, three failure modes of the debrief itself, one rule: a name or a circle — "we" never closes a row.
> Use with `the-decision-rights-map-guide.md`. The debrief runs the last five minutes of the twenty-five.

## How to run this debrief

- Keep the map visible — the wall, the board, the worksheet; wherever it lives, debrief looking at it, not at each other.
- Take the circled rows first; the clean rows need no discussion.
- End on the one reassigned decision, said back as a sentence: ___ decides, consults ___ before, tells ___ after. If the room hesitates at the sentence, the reassignment isn't done.

## Read the column

- Stand in front of the **Decides** column without talking. Count how many names surprised you.
- Look at who has the most rows. That's the map's real news, whether it's your manager or your quietest teammate.

## The twelve debrief questions

**1. Expected versus actual.**
"Looking down the Decides column — how many decisions have a name you'd expected, and how many surprised you?"
→ The gap between the chart and the hand that actually holds the pen.

**2. The bottleneck in disguise.**
"Which decisions have the same person on every row?"
→ A bottleneck wearing the mask of clarity.

**3. The unowned rows.**
"Which decisions have nobody who'll admit they own it?"
→ The ones quietly not being made; absence is a finding too.

**4. Chart versus reality.**
"Where does the person who *actually* decides differ from the person the org chart says decides?"
→ The real map — the one that predicts next quarter's collisions.

**5. Who decides, or whether to decide.**
"For the decision you circled: was the ambiguity about who decides, or about whether it *should* be a decision at all?"
→ Some friction is ownership; some is a non-decision nobody has the courage to make or kill.

**6. The penless absorber.**
"Who has been absorbing this decision without the authority — doing the work, carrying the risk, never holding the pen?"
→ The unpaid decider; giving them the name is usually the fastest fix on the wall.

**7. The cost of one more quarter.**
"What's the cost of leaving it ambiguous one more quarter — who pays it?"
→ Makes the abstraction expensive; ambiguity always has a payer, usually not the people in the room.

**8. Can the new owner actually decide?**
"Does the new owner have the information to decide well, or do they still need a real consulted circle built first?"
→ Ownership without information is a setup, not a hand-off.

**9. Say it back.**
"For this decision: ___ decides, consults ___ before moving, and tells ___ after. Does everyone actually agree?"
→ The reassignment's acceptance test — hesitation is the honest answer.

**10. What the old owner hands over.**
"What will the previous informal owner hand over, and what might they keep doing out of habit?"
→ The pen moves on paper first and in behavior later; naming the habit is how you catch the drift.

**11. Noticing the move.**
"How will you notice, in a month, that the pen really moved — not just on paper?"
→ The observable test; without it, the map fades back into the org chart by default.

**12. The escalation path.**
"What's the escalation if the new owner keeps deferring back to the group?"
→ A decider who can't decide is still an ambiguity — say now what happens then, while nobody's hurt.

## Failure modes of the debrief

1. **It turns into a grievance session.** The map becomes "things Joe does wrong." Rescue: rows are decisions, not people — every complaint gets rewritten as a missing name in a column.
2. **The room applauds and moves on.** Everyone agrees the map is clarifying; nothing changes Monday. Rescue: the debrief ends only when the reassigned row is stated as a sentence out loud — question 9 is not optional.
3. **A second decision sneaks into the reassignment.** The energy is high, so the room "also fixes" three more rows without naming owners. Rescue: one named move per session; everything else gets circled for the quarterly re-run.