The Problem With Undefined Boundaries

Ask ten leaders whether they want their teams to take more ownership, and ten will say yes. Ask those same leaders whether they’ve clearly defined where that ownership ends, and the room gets quieter.

Most organizations don’t struggle with a shortage of talented, capable people. They struggle with unclear boundaries — and unclear boundaries produce the opposite of freedom. They produce hesitation, disengagement, or drift, depending on who you ask and what they’ve learned to do about it.

What a Fenced Playground Teaches Us About Freedom

There’s a classic case study built around something deceptively simple: kickball.

Researchers observed how the physical layout of a playground affected the way elementary students played. At schools without fenced-in playgrounds, students learned, over time, to play close to the building and to limit how far they’d send the ball — because every time it rolled into the street, the game stopped while an adult retrieved it. The absence of a boundary didn’t create more freedom. It created a smaller, more cautious game.

At schools with fenced-in playgrounds, the opposite happened. Students played a bigger, more expansive game, trusting the boundary to contain it. They didn’t have to think about the edge of the field, so they could focus entirely on the game itself.

The boundary didn’t restrict play. It made a bigger, freer game possible.

This is the paradox at the center of Autonomy: the absence of boundaries doesn’t produce more freedom in organizations any more than it did on that playground. It produces smaller, more cautious behavior — because when people don’t know where the edges are, they learn to play it safe.

What Happens When Boundaries Aren’t Clear

When team members don’t know where an organization’s boundaries actually are, three outcomes tend to show up — none of them good, and all of them predictable:

• Team members default to asking permission before taking even basic action — a dynamic sometimes called the “Mother, may I…” effect.
• Some team members opt out entirely: they stop taking initiative and play it safe rather than risk stepping wrong.
• Others keep taking initiative, but without a clear boundary to guide them, they eventually make decisions that fall out of alignment with the organization’s mission and goals.

None of these are personality problems. They’re structural ones — predictable responses to an environment where the edges of the field were never drawn.

What Changes When Boundaries Are Clear

The inverse is just as consistent. When team members know where the boundaries are, the organization tends to see:

• Team members exercising real decision-making authority within their own sphere of influence.
• A genuine sense of ownership over the outcomes of those decisions.
• Interdependent teams that hold themselves accountable for quality, rather than waiting for a leader to catch what went wrong.

A clear org chart — one that accurately reflects how decisions actually get made — is a necessary part of this. But an org chart alone isn’t sufficient. Underneath it sits infrastructure: the softer systems, norms, and expectations that determine whether the org chart functions as designed or gets quietly worked around.

It’s worth putting a direct question to your leadership team: are your personnel policies, procedures, and protocols designed to grant freedom within boundaries — or are they designed to control people? Those are not the same design goal, and most organizations have never explicitly chosen between them.

Leadership Belief 2 in Practice

Organizational Health’s Leadership Belief 2 offers a working model for how boundaries can grant freedom rather than restrict it:

“We believe all decisions should be made at the most appropriate level and should be made as close to the point of implementation as possible. The competency and commitment levels of those involved will help determine the appropriate level.”

Notice what this belief does not say. It doesn’t say every decision should be pushed as far down as possible regardless of readiness. It says the right level for a given decision depends on the competency and commitment of the people making it — which means the boundary itself is meant to flex as people grow, not stay fixed.

This Leadership Belief also assumes something upstream of it: that decisions, wherever they’re made, remain consistent with the organization’s mission and goals (Leadership Belief 1). That assumption is the hinge point for everything that follows.

Autonomy Requires Goal Focus First

It’s tempting to treat Autonomy as a standalone lever — something you simply grant more or less of. In practice, how much Autonomy an organization can healthily extend depends heavily on where its people sit on a separate dimension: Goal Focus.

Goal Focus describes a team’s clarity, acceptance, and support of the organization’s goals. At the earlier stages — where team members are aware of goals but find them unrealistic, or understand the goals but haven’t personally bought in — extending more Autonomy doesn’t produce more ownership. It produces more distance between individual decisions and organizational intent.

It’s only once team members reach the later stages of Goal Focus — genuinely supporting the goals, having internalized them, or actively advocating for them — that leaders are in a position to extend meaningful Autonomy. At that point, the conversation can shift from accountability to responsibility.

Autonomy without Goal Focus is chaos.

Autonomy, understood this way, is not a synonym for “everyone does what they want.” It’s the capacity for a person, group, or organization to maintain its own ideals and goals — and meet its own needs — while still managing demands from outside. That capacity has to be earned through demonstrated readiness, not distributed evenly on principle.

A Starting Point for Your Leadership Team

Sit down with your key leaders and walk through your current org chart and personnel policies together. The value isn’t in making immediate changes — it’s in surfacing where the group’s perspectives diverge. Some will see more boundary than exists; others will see less.

The question worth sitting with as a group: does your organization’s current structure and infrastructure encourage Autonomy, or discourage it? You may not leave that conversation with decisions made. But you’re likely to leave it with a clearer map of where boundaries need to be broadened — and, just as often, where they need to be made clearer.

 

A version of this article originally appeared as a Culture Code Letter in September 2021. If you’d like to continue the conversation,  A Conversation About Leadership is published twice each month. [Join the conversation →]