A recurring team friction gets diagnosed, almost automatically, as a communication problem: "we just need to talk more," "we need better alignment meetings." Often, underneath the friction, is something much more specific and much more fixable: nobody ever actually agreed on whose call something is. More meetings don't fix that. Naming the decision right does.
What an unclear decision right looks like in practice
Two people who both reasonably believe a choice is theirs to make, and each is quietly frustrated that the other keeps "overriding" them. A decision that gets re-litigated every time it comes up, because there's no agreed owner to actually close it. A team that defaults to consensus for every choice, which feels inclusive and is often just slow, because nobody has the standing to say "we've heard everyone, here's the call" and have it stick.
From the outside, all of these look like personality conflict or poor communication. The actual fix in most cases isn't a conversation about communication styles - it's a conversation about who owns what.
What a decision right actually specifies
A real decision right names, for a specific category of decision (not every decision globally): who has final say once input has been gathered, who must be consulted before the decision is made, and who simply needs to be informed once it's final. That's a meaningfully different, more specific structure than "we're a collaborative team" - collaborative on input, clear on ownership.
How to actually create one
Name the recurring decision, specifically, not the whole relationship. "Who decides the final client-facing recommendation when the team disagrees" is a real, assignable decision right. "Who's really in charge" is not - it's too broad to actually assign or enforce.
Assign ownership based on who has the best information and the most at stake, not automatically by seniority. The person closest to the technical detail may be the right owner for a technical call even if someone more senior is in the room.
Make clear that ownership doesn't mean working alone. An owner is still expected to gather real input before deciding - the point of naming an owner isn't to exclude other people's views, it's to ensure someone is actually responsible for closing the decision once those views have been heard.
Write it down somewhere the team can actually see it, not just agree to verbally in a meeting that half the team wasn't in. A team charter or a simple shared document works - the format matters less than it being visible and referenceable later, especially the next time the same disagreement threatens to resurface.
Revisit it when it's clearly not working. A decision right assigned to the wrong person, or one that made sense when the team was smaller and doesn't anymore, is worth reassigning - treating the original assignment as permanent just because it was written down once defeats the purpose.
The result worth noticing
Teams that name decision rights explicitly tend to have less conflict that looks personal, not because the people get along better, but because a large share of what read as personality friction was actually structural - and structural problems have structural fixes that don't require anyone to change how they communicate at all.