The Steward of Enterprise Readiness
An Authority Map makes decision rights visible before a situation arrives: who can authorize, who must be consulted, who executes, and where escalation occurs.
A succession and delegation map adds a second discipline: who acts when a primary decision-maker is unavailable or circumstances require a change in leadership. No one can usefully improvise that authority once a signal becomes a Strategic Situation. A Prepared Response should show who holds each decision right, who convenes, who can act if the primary leader is unavailable, and where escalation begins. Otherwise the organization may spend, under pressure, the time preparation was meant to save.
"Decision rights, authority, and accountability must be built before pressure tests them."
Jayashree Venkataraman, Leadership Systems Advisor and Co-Founder of LeadWell Lab
Her point is about timing. Decision rights defined during a crisis can be shaped by time pressure and incomplete information. Authority set while a situation is in motion can favor whoever is most available or most senior over a considered design. A preparation architecture can build the Authority Map before a relevant class of situation becomes acute. Decisions about ownership, thresholds, and delegated resources can then be considered in advance, not inside the response window.
James March spent decades studying how organizations make decisions. His work looks beyond the quality of decisions to how structure influences which decisions get made and which questions receive attention.
March's work suggests that attention is structured, not distributed by a problem's importance alone. What reaches executive agendas may reflect what the structure is designed to surface. Issues outside any function's defined responsibility can slip between accountabilities and get attention only once they become urgent. The preparation gap this book describes can be understood as one such structural problem.
The steward of Enterprise Readiness has to understand the relationships among functions without managing every function. That follows from the architecture: no single department can prepare a cross-functional response it does not understand. The steward needs enough working knowledge of finance, legal, operations, communications, and other relevant domains. With it, the steward can help make dependencies and decision rights visible before those functions have to move together. How deep it goes depends on the organization's context, its situation portfolio, and the authority given to the steward.
Readiness does not fit inside any single function. It cuts across finance, technology, HR, project management, and others. In the organizations I observed, responsibility for cross-functional preparation was not always explicit. When no executive, budget, or governance process accounted for it, the work fell between functional boundaries. It got attention only after a situation exposed the gap.
The usual fix I saw was another governance layer or reporting system. It did not change the structure that had left preparation unassigned, so the next situation could expose the same delays. March's work offers one way to see this as a structural problem rather than a failure of individual leadership. The Project Management Institute's ongoing research points to a related question: whether delivery maturity alone is enough to produce the strategic outcomes initiatives were meant to achieve.
Changing the outcome may require changing the architecture. The steward of Enterprise Readiness is meant to help close that gap. Wendy Smith and Marianne Lewis have shown how organizations can hold consequential tensions rather than assume a single function can resolve them. A steward helps coordinate work across those tensions without taking over line functions.
Enterprise Readiness is an enterprise capability, not a case for PMO expansionism. Depending on the organization, stewardship could sit with the COO, the Chief of Staff, the Strategy function, a Transformation office, Enterprise Risk, or the PMO. The discipline matters more than the department running it. The PMO's broad view across commitments can make it a useful lens and a credible home where its mandate and relationships support the work, but it is not the only valid home. The steward coordinates preparation and makes cross-functional gaps visible, while line leaders keep ownership of their resources and decisions.
The mission is to improve the organization's ability to recognize, understand, prepare for, respond to, and learn from Strategic Situations. That does not mean abandoning project delivery, enforcing methodology, or producing reports for their own sake. It means helping ensure that relevant preparation exists before situations demand it.
The conversations can change too. Instead of "What is the status of our initiatives?" the steward can ask "What Strategic Situations are demanding executive attention that are not yet visible in the portfolio?" Where the old question was "Are projects on track?" the new one is "Where is our Readiness Gap expanding, and which class of situation would expose our current vulnerability most?" I led PMOs at several major organizations that began this transition.
In several, executive teams used to treating the PMO as the delivery function resisted. Expanding its mandate to readiness felt like scope creep into work belonging to Strategy, HR, or Risk. That resistance may reflect confusion about what stewardship means. Stewardship is not ownership. The steward does not own strategy, operations, technology, or finance, but can help maintain the relationships that support a coordinated response. Think of the steward as a connector, an integrator, and one possible venue for the cross-functional sensemaking Weick described. To outlast leadership change, that work needs a proper mandate and organizational support.
The structural problem calls for an accountable steward with enough access to see relevant Strategic Situations and the preparation profile for each. Whether that steward sits in the PMO, an Enterprise Readiness Office, or another function is secondary to the mandate, access, and relationships required.
What matters is whether someone is accountable, has the access to exercise the role, and can tell administrative coordination from strategic stewardship. March's work suggests that when no one is accountable for surfacing a concern, it may receive less attention. A structure tends to surface what it is designed to surface, and other issues can wait until a situation makes them urgent. The steward helps make readiness visible before a crisis.
A fair objection is that this diagnosis of coordination overhead seems to prescribe a new function to manage it. That is not the proposal. The Mobilization Tax estimate of $7.5 million to $36 million annually assumes 15 to 20 more significant situations in the earlier illustration. It is not a measured annual total, a proven floor, or a cross-organization benchmark. Senior leader time spent assembling authority, ownership, stakeholder sequence, and governance is a cost an organization may already incur, though the size will vary. Stewardship is meant to make that work visible and reusable, not necessarily to add a department.
The question for your organization is whether that design exists. If the PMO is measured only on delivery, it may lack the mandate or measures to steward readiness. Another function could still provide that stewardship.