Part II — Seeing Organizational Flow · Chapter 9 · 4 min read · First Public Draft

Ownership

Nobody Could Say Management Put Me Here

The one time I watched ownership arrive on its own, and what it took.

Reduces frictionCreates valueOwnership clarity

I have seen high ownership happen properly once, in the way it is supposed to, and I have been trying to work out ever since how much of it was the method and how much was luck.

We were standing up a new product organization. The normal approach would have been to draw the teams, staff them, announce them, and then spend six months explaining the reasoning to people who had not been in the room. We had all done that before, and we knew what those six months cost — not in effort, which we were happy to spend, but in the fact that the explaining rarely worked. People do not come to own a structure by having it explained well.

So instead we put everyone in a room. Developers, business specialists, architects, the cross-functional roles that usually get allocated last and told where they are going. Then we stepped back.

No manager decided who belonged where. No org chart dictated the outcome. There was one rule: every product needed a team with all the competences required to succeed.

The whole thing took less than two days.

What happened inside those two days was the part I did not expect, though I had hoped for it.

People did not optimize for themselves. I had braced for that — for everyone gravitating to the interesting product, or to their friends, or away from the difficult legacy thing nobody wanted. Some of that happened at the edges. Mostly it did not.

What they optimized for was the products. They discussed dependencies. They balanced skills. They noticed gaps and argued about who should fill them. Somebody moved off the exciting new thing because the unglamorous one would fail without them, and said so out loud, in front of everyone, without being asked.

Nobody instructed any of that. They did it because the outcome now depended on them, and they could see it depending on them.

The energy in that room is hard to describe without sounding like a brochure. People laughing, challenging each other, helping each other, solving problems together — not because it was required, but because they were building something they believed in and had just been handed the pen.

Every team left knowing why it existed, what it owned, and how it depended on the others. And not one person could say management put me here, because management hadn’t.

Ownership was not assigned. It emerged.

Looking back, I do not think self-selection was the active ingredient.

That is the part people want to take away, and it is the part least likely to transfer. Run the same exercise in an organization where the last three reorganizations were announced rather than discussed, and you will get a room full of people waiting to be told what the right answer is, followed by a quiet renegotiation afterwards by whoever has the most political capital.

What made it work was underneath. We trusted people to make good decisions, visibly, in a way that would have been embarrassing to walk back. They understood the purpose well enough to make trade-offs against it. And they built the organization together, which is a different thing entirely from being handed one and asked for feedback.

The self-selection was how those conditions expressed themselves. It was not what produced them.

Which points at something I have seen hold everywhere since, including in rooms nothing like that one.

People rarely resist responsibility. They resist responsibility for decisions they never had the opportunity to influence.

That distinction accounts for most of what gets called change resistance in my experience. The person pushing back on the new structure is rarely opposed to the structure. They are being asked to own the consequences of something that arrived finished, and they can already see the parts that will not work, and nobody asked them at the point when saying so would have been useful.

Ownership handed down is a job description. Ownership taken is a different substance entirely, and the only reliable way I know to produce it is to be in the room earlier than feels comfortable, with less of it decided than feels safe.

Ownership taken has a different quality to ownership accepted, and I have never found a way to hand somebody the second and get the first.

Cultivating this: Drawing the Line Around a Team, in Part III.