Decision rights

The specific, documented authority a steward holds to act, most commonly the right to block a dataset or pipeline change from being marked production-ready until it meets a quality or governance standard, distinguished from a mere responsibility to flag or report problems that someone else with power may or may not act on.

An explicit specification of who makes and owns each significant decision. In the AI era, captured as a RACI-plus-AI map (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed, plus what the AI is permitted to do). The absence of a clear decision-rights map is the most common structural cause of failed AI redesigns.

The explicit statement of who decides each major transformation decision, mapped so that authority is a fact rather than an assumption.

The guardrail defining who is authorized to approve that an AI system may go live and who owns it afterward. At small scale a named person; at large scale a governance body with a risk-tiered approval path.

The explicit definition, inside the charter, of what the leader can decide alone, what requires sign-off, and what is not theirs to decide. Prevents both being blocked on every move and being blamed for overreach.