Consensus decision-making is popular in financial institutions because it feels safe — no single person owns a decision that turns out badly. This is precisely its hidden cost: a decision nobody owns is a decision nobody will defend when circumstances change, which means it gets relitigated indefinitely.
I've sat in committees that reopened the same resourcing decision four times in eighteen months, not because new information had emerged, but because no individual had the standing to say the decision was settled. Consensus structures produce this pattern reliably, because settling a question requires someone with the authority to close it, and consensus structures are specifically designed to avoid concentrating that authority anywhere.
The alternative isn't autocracy. It's naming a single accountable decision-owner for each specific category of decision, with a genuine, documented process for others to be consulted — consultation being different from requiring their agreement. The decision-owner listens, then decides, and the decision stays decided.
Institutions resist this because it feels like it concentrates risk in one person. In practice, it does the opposite: it makes clear exactly who is accountable for a bad outcome, which produces more careful decisions, not less careful ones. Diffuse accountability is what actually produces poor decisions, because no one individually bears the reputational cost of getting it wrong.
The operating model question worth asking in any institution is simple: for the decisions that matter most, is there one person who can be asked, directly, why the current answer is still the right one? If the honest answer is 'it depends who you ask,' the decision isn't actually being managed — it's being deferred.