In The BRIDGE Method for Cross-Functional Meeting Success, I used Apollo 13 as an example of successful cross-functional coordination. Flight controllers, engineers, astronauts, and ground crews all pulled together to bring a crippled space shuttle home. It’s a good example, but it has a key piece that makes it easier is some ways than many other problems you’ll encounter.
Gene Kranz had the final say. Nobody in that room needed to figure out whose call it was. NASA had already answered that question before the shuttle ever took off.
Many cross-functional teams don’t have a Kranz. You can bring together the right people, have a clear purpose, well-structured input, and document your reasoning but still end the meeting without an authoritative decision, because the person with the authority to make one was never in the room. Sometimes that person doesn’t even exist because nobody in the company has ever had to deal with the sort of questions you’re facing now.
The Question BRIDGE Assumes You Can Answer
The second step of my BRIDGE framework is to define decision-making authority before the discussion starts. Will you be making this decision by consensus? Will one specific person make the call, and the rest are there to give their input? Is it a joint decision between two department heads? This step of the framework assumes that you know who has the power to decide the outcome. Most of the time you do, but occasionally you’ll run into situations where it isn’t clear.
This is the same problem we looked at a couple weeks ago in Why No One Owns the Problem Between Departments. Ownership gets drawn around departments, but not necessarily around decisions that span both of them.
The Clean Handoff
In these situations, the best thing to do is name the deadlock explicitly. Make sure everyone involved understands that the decision you’re facing exceeds what anyone present is authorized to make. Then prepare to present it the same way we looked at in last week’s article on Building Influence Without Authority. Put together two or three options with the pros and cons of each and a date by which a decision has to be made..
Then you need to find the actual owner. This does not always mean you’re just looking for a more senior person. It’s whoever has, or should have, authority over both sides of the decision. Sometimes it is as easy as a shared manager. But other times there isn’t anybody, and the best you can do is propose who should own decisions like this going forward.
Bring them the options you came up with, the trade-offs between them, and where everyone in the group stands on the question. You need to give them enough information so that if they weren’t in the meeting they can still make an informed decisions without having to re-litigate the whole discussion.
Always make sure to document who made the decision and why they were the person that made it. When things like this come up and there isn’t clear ownership, it’s rarely a one-off. Chances are that future problems will pop up in the same grey area, and you’ll want to have a clear answer next time about who has authority over that area. Record it so everyone knows moving forward.
From Theory to Action
Before your next cross-functional meeting, identify whether anyone involved has authority to decide the thing you’re meeting about.
If the answer is no, say so clearly and make sure everyone knows it, rather than letting it fizzle out with a vague “let’s regroup.”
Package any stalled decisions as a couple named options with real deadlines.
Watch for the difference between a genuine deadlock and a room that just needs one more structured conversation. Not every stall means no one has authority.
Track which decisions in the operation keep getting kicked down the road unresolved. That pattern usually indicates a gap where nobody holds clear authority.