The Professional Collaboration Series: Blog 4 of 8: The Licence Problem, Part 1: Why Structure Determines Who Can Challenge Whom

How organisational structures formally grant or deny permission for constructive disagreement – regardless of courage or skill.

Imagine your team has successfully built the courage to disagree. Leaders model vulnerability. People feel psychologically safe. The behavioural techniques are practised and ready.

Then someone raises a concern about a strategic direction, and the response is: "That's not your lane."

Or: "This decision sits at a different level."

Or: "You're not close enough to the commercial realities to understand the constraints."

The person had courage. They used the right language. But they lacked something more fundamental: organisational licence to challenge.

This is the second critical gap: the Licence Problem. Even when people know what to say and have courage to say it, organisational structures can systematically deny them permission to do so.

What HBR Missed: The Question of Permission

The Harvard Business Review research (referenced in Blog 1) focuses entirely on individual behavioural techniques. It assumes people operate in neutral environments where disagreement is simply a matter of skill and intention.

But real organisations aren't neutral. They're structured hierarchies with formal and informal roles, defined responsibilities, explicit accountabilities, and implicit rules about who gets to challenge whom, about what, and when.

The research doesn't, however, ask: Does this person have authority to question this decision? Is their role positioned to see the relevant information? Does the organisational structure grant them standing to disagree?

Without addressing these questions, all the linguistic training remains theoretical. You can teach someone perfect receptive language, but if the structure says "that's above your pay grade," the training was wasted effort.

This is why organisations can simultaneously invest in conflict management training whilst maintaining structures that prohibit what they're training people to do.

The Fundamental Questions of Licence

Structure determines licence through three mechanisms:

Who gets to disagree with whom?

In most organisations, there are implicit rules about directional challenge. Junior people can disagree with peers relatively freely. Disagreeing with your direct manager is acceptable within bounds. Disagreeing with senior leaders two or three levels up becomes progressively more difficult – not because of individual relationships, but because structure defines it as inappropriate.

"I wouldn't raise that if I were you" isn't always about psychological safety. Sometimes it's structural reality: "You don't have standing to challenge that decision."

About what?

Even when people have licence to disagree, structure often defines the scope. You can challenge how we implement, but not whether we should. You can question tactics, but not strategy. You can raise operational concerns, but not commercial ones.

These boundaries aren't always explicit. But they're enforced through subtle signals: whose concerns get airtime in meetings, whose emails get responses, whose challenges are taken seriously versus politely acknowledged then ignored.

When?

Structure also determines timing of licence. In many organisations, you can disagree during the "input phase" of decision-making. But once a decision reaches a certain level or stage, challenging it becomes structurally inappropriate – "we're past that now."

This creates a perverse dynamic: the further a flawed decision progresses, the fewer people have structural licence to stop it, even when the flaw becomes more obvious and costly.

How Structure Blocks Licence

Several structural patterns systematically deny licence even when organisations claim to value challenge:

Role Confusion as Silencing Mechanism

When roles and responsibilities aren't clearly defined, disagreement becomes territorial rather than productive. "Is this my decision or yours?" "Who owns this risk?"

Without clarity, people don't know whether they have standing to challenge. So they stay silent, challenge and get slapped down, or engage in turf battles that weaponise disagreement.

Matrix Structures Without Clear Accountability

Matrix organisations – where people report to multiple managers or where functional and project accountabilities intersect – are particularly prone to licence problems.

When accountability is diffuse, so is licence. "I'm not sure if this is my place to raise this" becomes the default position. People wait for someone else with clearer standing to challenge – and often, no one does.

Hierarchy That Conflates Seniority With Knowledge

Many organisational structures grant licence based on level, not proximity to information or impact. The VP of strategy can challenge the technical architecture. But the technical architect can't challenge the strategic direction – even when that direction is technically impossible.

Governance That Privileges Parent Over Partnership

This is particularly visible in joint ventures, alliances, and partnerships. Consider the joint venture case from Blog 2: formally defined JV roles existed, but governance structures routed decisions back to parent organisations. People in the JV didn't have actual authority to challenge parent company requirements, even when those requirements undermined JV success.

The JV structure existed on paper. But the governance structure granted licence to parent organisations, not to the collaborative entity.

Formal Mechanisms That Grant Licence

How do organisations create structures that actually enable disagreement?

Designated Dissent Roles

Some organisations formalise dissent by creating roles explicitly chartered to challenge. Not performative "devil's advocate," but structural licence: "This person's job is to find flaws, and you must respond substantively."

Examples include red team reviewers who must approve major decisions, independent technical authorities who can halt projects on safety grounds, or risk officers with veto rights on certain decisions. The key is that these aren't advisory roles easily ignored – they have structural authority.

Decision Protocols Requiring Contrary Views

Rather than creating dissent roles, some organisations build dissent into decision processes. Before major decisions, someone must formally articulate the contrary position. Not "here are risks to manage," but "here's the affirmative case against this decision."

This grants licence structurally: you're not challenging because you're difficult – you're challenging because the process requires it.

Protected Feedback Channels With Actual Protection

Many organisations have feedback mechanisms: skip-level meetings, anonymous surveys, "open door" policies. But do they provide actual protection?

True structural protection means genuine anonymity where promised, no retaliation, visible evidence that feedback led to change, and clear accountability for responding to what's surfaced.

Post-Mortems That Examine Silenced Dissent

After major decisions, most organisations review what happened. Few examine what didn't happen: what dissent was silenced or ignored.

Structuring reviews to explicitly ask "what concerns were raised that we didn't act on, and why?" grants retroactive licence and exposes structural patterns about whose concerns get systematically ignored.

Clear Accountability Alignment

Perhaps most fundamental: ensuring people are accountable only for outcomes they can influence and ensuring people who can influence outcomes have authority to challenge decisions that affect those outcomes.

If you hold someone accountable for project delivery but don't grant them licence to challenge resource decisions that affect delivery, you've created a structure that punishes them for problems they're not permitted to prevent.

Aligning accountability with authority grants implicit licence: "If you're responsible for this outcome, you have standing to challenge decisions that affect it."

The Structural Requirements from Professional Collaboration

Our Professional Collaboration framework identifies several structural requirements:

Alignment of Accountability and Responsibility: People must have authority proportionate to their accountability. This alignment is what grants meaningful licence.

Agreed Sense of Identity: Particularly in multi-organisation collaborations, structural clarity about "who we are" and "what we're chartered to do" determines what challenges are within scope.

Collective Leadership Coherence: The structural architecture of leadership – how decisions flow, how challenge is incorporated – must be consistent. Mixed messages about whether challenge is welcome destroy structural licence.

These aren't cultural aspirations. They're structural design requirements.

Why This Matters Even More Than Culture

Here's the difficult truth: you can have a culture that genuinely values disagreement, leaders who authentically welcome challenge, and people with courage to speak up – and still have disagreement fail because structure prohibits it.

Culture creates conditions for courage. But structure creates conditions for permission.

Permission is often the harder barrier to overcome, because it's less visible. People internalise structural constraints: "This isn't my place to raise this" doesn't feel like suppression – it feels like appropriate professional boundaries.

When organisations focus only on culture without examining structure, they create cognitive dissonance: we say we want disagreement, but our structures prohibit it.

Courage without licence is frustration. Licence without courage goes unused. But structure is where licence is formally granted – and it must be intentional.

Key Takeaways

1. Even with courage, people need organisational permission to disagree. Structure determines who has licence to challenge whom, about what, and when.
2. Organisations can simultaneously train people in disagreement techniques whilst maintaining structures that prohibit using them. This creates the illusion of commitment without the reality.
3. Role clarity isn't restrictive – it's enabling. When people know they have standing to challenge, they're more likely to do so. When roles are confused, disagreement becomes territorial.
4. Formal mechanisms that grant licence must have actual authority, not just advisory status. Protected channels must actually protect. Dissent roles must have real power.
5. The hardest structural challenge is making licence explicit. Many organisations operate on implicit rules about who can challenge what. Making these explicit – and revising them where they block necessary challenge – is uncomfortable but essential.

But even when structure grants licence formally, daily systems can undermine it in practice. In the next post, we'll explore how workflows, processes, and digital tools either operationalise or silently deny the permission that structure is meant to provide.

Next in the series: "The Licence Problem, Part 2: How Your Systems Silence Dissent (Without Anyone Noticing)" – How meeting designs, decision workflows, information flows, and digital infrastructure either enable or systematically silence the disagreement that structure formally permits.

To discuss how we can help your organisation assess and redesign structures for constructive disagreement, contact us at enquiries@advance-consultancy.com.