Bob Iger took over Disney and found a floor he wasn’t expecting.
Four floors up, in a room nobody outside the company ever saw, sat something called Strat Planning: a full corporate strategy department, stocked with sharp people, reviewing every dollar the company spent.
A new licensing deal. A marketing push. A change to how a park ran its lines.
All of it went through floor four first.
The division heads who actually ran those businesses could see a problem developing in real time. A licensing partner going soft. A competitor undercutting a price. A ride breaking down in the worst possible week of the year.
What they couldn’t do was act.
Not without a formal re-review, weeks out, by people who’d never stood in that park.
Iger tore the department down.
The easy reading of that story is too much central control, should’ve decentralized. I don’t think that’s actually what was broken.
Floor four owned every call in the company and had none of the ground truth. The division heads had the ground truth and owned nothing.
Nobody up there was protecting turf, particularly. Nobody down there was hiding information out of spite.
It’s simpler than that, and worse. Nobody’s actual job was moving what the ground knew up to where the decisions got made.
So it didn’t move. Not through resistance. Through default.
I keep seeing a version of this argument going around this year, dressed up for the AI moment: kill consensus, name one owner for every call, let two or three people veto, everyone else executes. It has a name: OVIS (Owns, Vetoes/Influences, Supports). The piece that introduced it, in Harvard Business Review, put the stakes bluntly: “The companies that survive the next decade will not be those with the best algorithms or the most data. They will be those that have the courage to abandon how decisions get made.”
I don’t think the real case for it is speed, though that’s how it gets pitched.
I think it’s that AI is quietly flooding every level of a company with more ground-level data than it’s ever had: sensor data, usage data, real-time signals from wherever the actual work happens.
The knowledge gap between floor four and the park was always there. It was just easy to ignore when nobody downstream had the tools to make it visible.
Now everyone can see it. That makes the old arrangement harder to defend, and a framework like OVIS much more tempting.
Here’s what OVIS actually does, and what it doesn’t.
It forces an organization to name exactly one person who owns a given call. That’s real, and it’s useful. Most paralysis I’ve watched happen wasn’t a disagreement. It was nobody willing to say this is mine to decide.
What it doesn’t do is guarantee that person knows anything about what’s actually happening on the ground. You can run OVIS with the owner sitting on floor four just as easily as you can run it with the owner sitting in the park. The framework is silent on that question. It was never built to answer it.
Knowledge without authority is useless.
Authority without knowledge is useless.
Most organizations run both problems at once, in different departments, and call it a structure.
Before you reach for a framework, any framework, there’s a simpler question worth asking first.
Does the person who actually knows what’s happening sit anywhere near the person with the authority to act on it? Or have you built two rooms, years apart, and hoped a flowchart would eventually connect them?