Part 3: Exception Drift: Where Authority Actually Lives
Why the Organisation Doesn’t Do What Was Decided
This article is part of a three-part series on senior engineering leadership.
Decision containers explain why senior conversations don’t converge without explicit boundaries.
Decision half-life explains why decisions weaken even when everyone agrees.
And yet, a question remains:
If decisions are made clearly, inside the right containers, and actively reinforced -
why does the organisation still end up somewhere no one explicitly chose?
This is where many new senior leaders reach for familiar explanations.
“Teams aren’t aligned.”
“we should work together in better ways”
“People aren’t following through.”
“We need stronger ownership.”
But these explanations share a quiet assumption:
That authority flows from decisions.
At senior altitude, it often doesn’t.
Authority Does Not Live Where Decisions Are Made
Look at the outcomes your organisation produces over six months. Now list the decisions you remember making deliberately. The two lists rarely match.
This is not because decisions were ignored, but because outcomes are shaped more by who can bend decisions than by who made them.
That is where authority actually lives.
A Familiar Example: When Direction Becomes Optional
A leadership group agrees to a platform standard.
The decision is explicit:
New services must use the shared platform
Existing services should migrate opportunistically
Exceptions require review
On paper, authority is clear.
Now watch what happens.
One team has a major revenue deadline and ships on the old stack “temporarily.”
Another integrates partially and fills gaps locally.
A third escalates early and gets an exception approved.
A fourth quietly delays, waiting to see how strictly the rule is enforced.
Six months later, the platform exists - but only as one option among many.
Ask anyone involved and they’ll say:
“Yes, of course the platform is the direction.”
Ask the system and it answers differently.
The system says:
“The platform is optional under pressure.”
No one decided that explicitly. But someone had the authority to make it true.
This is what I’ve started to think of as Exception Drift - when decisions remain symbolically intact while reality quietly reorganises itself around tolerated exceptions.
Decision Rights vs. Practical Authority
At team level leadership, authority and decision rights are tightly coupled.
If you decide something inside your team, it happens - or the failure is immediately visible.
At senior level leadership, authority becomes distributed, uneven, and situational.
Authority accrues to those who can:
create exceptions without penalty
delay without consequence
reinterpret decisions without being corrected
absorb pressure without escalation
These are not formal powers. They don’t appear on org charts. But they shape reality far more reliably than approved decisions do.
The Quiet Mistake Senior Leaders Make
Leaders new to senior leadership often believe their job is to make better decisions.
So they invest in:
clearer rationale
stronger alignment
better documentation
All useful, but insufficient. Because the organisation is not waiting for better decisions.
It is already deciding - continuously through:
exception handling
trade-off resolution
deadline negotiation
priority collisions
If you are not actively shaping where those micro-decisions land, authority migrates elsewhere.
The Most Tempting and Wrong Lesson
At this point, many leaders draw a conclusion that feels obvious:
“Authority is too weak. We need to assert it harder.”
This shows up as:
tighter enforcement
fewer exceptions
stronger language
louder restatement of decisions
This response feels decisive, but, it is also exactly how things get worse.
Because asserting authority harder does not reclaim authority. It pushes it underground.
Exceptions don’t disappear - they go covert.
Deviation becomes less visible, not less frequent.
Escalation is delayed until failure is unavoidable.
The organisation learns a new skill:
How to sound compliant while acting locally rational.
Leadership feels stronger. The system becomes less governable.
This is how Exception Drift accelerates - when authority becomes symbolic rather than binding.
Where Authority Actually Shows Up
You can usually find real authority by asking a few uncomfortable questions:
Who can say “just this once” without consequences?
Who gets overridden when timelines slip?
Who escalates - and who never needs to?
Whose interpretation becomes the default when things are ambiguous?
These patterns are stable. They persist even when leaders change, strategies shift, and priorities are restated. Which is why senior leadership failures often feel personal but aren’t. The system is doing exactly what it has been designed - or allowed to do.
Why This Feels Like Politics (But Isn’t)
When authority is invisible, it gets described as politics.
But politics implies intent. Most of what happens here doesn’t require intent at all. People act rationally within their local constraints. The system aggregates those actions into outcomes no one owns.
The result feels political because it is unowned power. And unowned power always feels uncomfortable.
The Senior Leadership Shift
At Senior altitude, your role is not just to decide.
It is to:
notice where authority has pooled unintentionally
decide which interpretations are allowed to stand
constrain where exceptions live
make power visible enough that it can be exercised consciously
This is why the role feels heavier even when you “do less.” You are no longer managing work. You are managing where reality bends.
The Shape of the Work (In Retrospect)
Seen together, the three parts of this series describe a single transition.
Decision containers explain where uncertainty is allowed to end.
Decision half-life explains why decisions don’t sustain themselves.
Practical authority explains why outcomes emerge elsewhere anyway.
This is the work that replaces execution as you move from team level leadership to senior leadership.
Not better answers.
Not stronger alignment.
But clearer boundaries, active reinforcement, and conscious ownership of where authority lives.
Once you can see this, a lot of senior engineering work stops feeling vague.
And starts feeling exactly as concrete - and consequential - as it always was.