What is decision rights?

Decision rights is a concept in personal epistemology: Know which decisions you must make yourself and which can be delegated.

Example: You lead a product team and face forty decisions a week. Some are architectural — which platform to build on, which market to enter first, which partnerships to pursue. Others are operational — which bug to fix next, how to format the weekly report, which vendor to use for office supplies. For years you treated every decision as equally yours, and the result was predictable: chronic bottlenecking, exhausted attention, and a team that stopped thinking for themselves because you would override them anyway. Now you apply delegation criteria explicitly. You maintain a short list of decisions that require your specific judgment — those that are irreversible, that cross departmental boundaries, or that directly implicate your team's strategic direction. Everything else has a designated owner and a clear authority level. The vendor choice? Delegated with budget constraints. The bug prioritization? Delegated to the engineering lead with escalation criteria. The weekly report format? Delegated entirely — you do not even review it. Your decision load dropped by sixty percent. Your team's ownership increased proportionally. And the decisions you kept — the ones that actually required your judgment — got better, because you had the cognitive bandwidth to think about them properly.

This concept is part of Phase 23 (Decision Frameworks) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for decision frameworks.