The likelihood, expressed as a percentage, that the decisions and actions delegated in this meeting will actually execute — based on how complete the handoff signals were.
Direct Answer
Delegation Flow is a percentage score measuring the likelihood that delegated decisions and actions from a meeting will execute cleanly. It is calculated from two inputs: closure signal completeness (whether the delegation had an explicit owner, a defined next step, and a deadline or trigger) and arena fit (whether the delegation was produced in a meeting context appropriate for producing clean handoffs). A score of 100% means every delegation was structurally complete and the arena was appropriate for the work. A lower score means one or both of those conditions was not met — and the delegations produced are at risk of stalling, being misunderstood, or never executing.
A delegation is clean when the person receiving it knows exactly what they're accountable for, by when, and with what authority. That requires three things to be explicit in the moment of delegation: who owns it (named, not implied), what the next step is (specific, not vague), and when it is due or what will trigger it. When all three are present, the delegation can survive handoff — it can travel from the room to the person's calendar, inbox, or task list without losing its meaning. When any is missing, the delegation depends on memory, inference, and follow-through under conditions of competing priority.
Sam Kaner, lead author of Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making (Jossey-Bass, 2007), is precise about the consequence: the odds of successful implementation only increase when a group explicitly establishes "what needs to be done, who will do it, by when, and with what resources." When groups stay vague on those specifics, "no one takes responsibility, and nothing happens." The McKinsey Team Effectiveness Index, drawn from research by Aaron De Smet and colleagues (2024), defines decision health the same way: high-performing teams end meetings with an explicit summary of what was decided, who owns the next step, and the rationale. Both frameworks converge on the same structural requirement. Delegation Flow measures whether it was met.
A failed delegation is a structural vulnerability, not a personal one. When work doesn't get done after a meeting, the instinct is to locate the failure in the person who received the task. The structural read is different: ownership was implied rather than named, or a deadline was assumed rather than stated. The gap is in the handoff, not in the recipient.
Not all meeting arenas produce clean delegations equally. Kaner's Diamond of Participatory Decision-Making identifies distinct zones of group work — a Divergent Zone where the goal is quantity and variety of ideas, and a Convergent Zone where the group evaluates, decides, and commits. Clean delegations belong in the Convergent Zone and its closure phase. Attempting to extract a binding commitment during the Divergent Zone produces what Kaner calls "pseudo-solutions" — the ideas haven't passed through critical evaluation yet, so any commitment made at that stage is structurally premature.
This maps directly to arenas. A Planning arena is designed for scoped assignments — decisions land with owners and deadlines. An Ideation arena is a Divergent Zone: it produces possibilities, not commitments. A delegation extracted from an Ideation session carries different execution likelihood than the same delegation extracted from a Planning session, even if the surface-level structural signals are identical. Delegation Flow accounts for this. Arena fit is part of the calculation precisely because the context of a commitment shapes its reliability.
A low score is a leading indicator. The delegations haven't failed yet — but the structural conditions for clean execution are not in place. This is the window to act. Research on remote collaboration links the absence of explicit ownership and deadlines before the meeting ends directly to project stagnation: work stops at the threshold between agreement and execution, and recovering it costs far more time than closing the gap would have.
The right intervention is a language swap. The question is not "Why hasn't this been done?" — that framing locates the problem in the person. The question is "We didn't explicitly define the deadline or the owner before we adjourned — let me fix that now." That framing locates the problem in the structure, which is where it actually is. The practical step is to document the missing variables — owner, next step, deadline — in a decision log before the work starts. That takes minutes. Reconstructing what was agreed and who was responsible after the work has stalled takes hours and often produces its own decision churn.
Delegation Flow is a percentage, and the percentage abstraction can obscure magnitude. A meeting that produces ten clean routine delegations and one ambiguous high-stakes strategic handoff might score 90% — a number that looks strong while leaving the highest-consequence item at risk. The aggregate score is a useful trend signal. The item-level breakdown is where the actual exposure lives.
There is also a domain exception worth noting. The strict requirement for a defined next step and deadline holds in ordered environments — Planning, Status Update, Decision Forum — where constraints are known and timelines are predictable. In genuinely complex, unpredictable situations, Cynefin argues that rigid deadlines and specific action steps can cause failure rather than prevent it. Complex problems call for enabling constraints — loose coupling, safe-to-fail experiments — where outcomes and timelines are intentionally left emergent. Delegation Flow is most reliable as a diagnostic in arenas where the work is ordered enough that structural completeness predicts execution reliability.
Delegation Flow and Rework Risk are forward-looking signals derived from the same underlying data — partial and incomplete closures. Delegation Flow expresses the aggregate execution probability across all delegations from the meeting. Rework Risk counts the specific closures most likely to resurface. Together, they answer two distinct questions: how reliably will this meeting's work get done (Delegation Flow), and which specific items will we be revisiting in a future meeting (Rework Risk)?
Kaner, S., Lind, L., Toldi, C., Fisk, S., & Berger, D. (2007). Facilitator's guide to participatory decision-making (2nd ed.). Jossey-Bass.
De Smet, A., D'Auria, G., Meijknecht, L., & Albaharna, M. (2024). Go, teams: When teams get healthier, the whole organization benefits. McKinsey & Company.
Snowden, D. (1999). Liberating knowledge. In Liberating Knowledge. CBI Business Guide. Caspian Publishing.
"When groups stay fuzzy on what needs to be done, who will do it, and by when — no one takes responsibility, and nothing happens." — Sam Kaner
Delegation Flow is a percentage score measuring the likelihood that delegated decisions and actions from a meeting will execute cleanly. It is calculated from two inputs: closure signal completeness (whether the delegation had an explicit owner, a defined next step, and a deadline or trigger) and arena fit (whether the delegation was produced in a meeting context appropriate for producing clean handoffs). A score of 100% means every delegation was structurally complete and the arena was appropriate for the work. A lower score means one or both of those conditions was not met — and the delegations produced are at risk of stalling, being misunderstood, or never executing.
Two inputs: closure signal completeness (whether each delegation had an explicit named owner, a specific defined next step, and a deadline or trigger) and arena fit (whether the delegation was produced in a meeting context appropriate for generating clean commitments). Both affect execution likelihood. A structurally complete delegation produced in an arena not designed for commitment-making carries more risk than its surface completeness suggests.
Because it represents a probability, not a count. It answers the question: given the structural signals present in this meeting's delegations, what is the likelihood they will execute cleanly? A high percentage means the conditions for clean execution are in place. A lower percentage means structural gaps exist that create execution risk. The percentage format makes it easy to track across meetings and spot trends — a team whose Delegation Flow is consistently declining has a worsening delegation quality problem, not a random bad day.
Close the structural gaps before the work stalls. The intervention starts with a language swap: shift from "Why hasn't this been done?" to "We didn't explicitly define the deadline or the owner before we adjourned — let me fix that now." The first question blames the recipient. The second locates the problem in the structure, which is where it is. Practically, this means documenting the missing variables — owner, next step, deadline — in a decision log immediately after the meeting. That takes minutes. Reconstructing who was responsible and what was agreed after the work has stalled takes hours and often creates its own churn.
The weighted rate at which this meeting's closures were structurally complete
The specific partial closures most likely to resurface in a future meeting
The per-meeting composite score across all five coordination dimensions
Decisions agreed to escalate but with no one carrying them forward
How closure completeness determines whether decisions survive contact with execution.
ResearchThe structural patterns that trigger rework cycles across teams and organizations.
Community ResearchWhat happens when delegation scaffolding disappears from the organizational structure.
Category DefinitionThe foundational layer that makes teams predictable, trustworthy, and fast.
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