Organizations often collapse several different qualities into one role: authority, expertise, experience, judgment, responsibility, and status. Once bundled together, it becomes easy to assume that the person with the right to decide must also be the person who understands the situation best.
Sometimes that is true. Often it is not.
Separate the capacities
Authority answers a governance question: who is permitted to make this decision? Wisdom is a quality of perception and judgment. Expertise answers what someone knows. Responsibility tells us who will carry the consequence. These can overlap, but a healthy system does not depend on them always belonging to the same person.
A person can have authority without insight, and insight without authority.
The design challenge is therefore to make the relationship explicit. A decision can have a clear authority holder while drawing on people with deeper technical knowledge, lived experience, or proximity to the effects.
Authority needs permeability
This does not require every decision to become consensus. It means authority should have ways to receive signal, context, dissent, and evidence before acting.
The question is not only “who decides?” but also “what knowledge must reach the decision, whose experience matters, and how can the system notice when authority and wisdom have drifted too far apart?”