OWNERSHIP IS THE VARIABLE NOBODY NAMES
The most common sentence said inside growing organizations is “we need a better system.” Most of the time, it is a misdiagnosis.
The conversation that follows usually goes to tools. Should we move to Asana, should we get rid of the spreadsheet, should we evaluate a new platform. Three months later there is a new tool, and the same friction shows up inside it. What looks like a tool problem is usually a vacancy. The work has no named owner.
When organizations are small, ownership is implicit. There are five people, everyone touches everything, and the owner of a workflow is whoever started it, or whoever cared most, or whoever happened to be in the room when it became a problem. That works at five. It does not work at fifteen, and it does not work at thirty.
By the time the org has grown into multiple teams, the implicit owner is no longer in every room. Workflows that used to be held by one person now pass through three. Nobody was assigned and nobody was told. The handoff is invisible until something falls, and at that point someone says we need a better system.
Four signatures show up inside the organization when this is what is actually happening, and all four read like workflow problems even though none of them are. The same question gets answered different ways depending on who is in the meeting, because nobody owns the answer. Things get half-done and the half that is missing is never the same half twice, because nobody owns the close. Tools get adopted by some people and ignored by others, and the people who ignore them never get pushed on it, because nobody owns enforcement. Documents get written and nobody updates them, because nobody owns the document.
A tool migration will not solve any of that. What will solve it is naming the owner.
The Clarity Lens has a short section called Clarify Ownership that asks three questions. Who owns this process, and do they know that. Who else touches this workflow, and are they trained on it. What happens when that person leaves. These are basic questions, and they get skipped because the answers are uncomfortable. When the room does not know who owns something, the comfortable move is to talk about the tool. The hard move is to name the owner.
Naming the owner does three things at once. It tells the owner this is theirs. It tells everyone else it is not theirs. And it tells the system what to optimize for, because a workflow with a named owner is a workflow with a measurable shape.
Most of the operations problems inside growing organizations resolve when the ownership question gets answered before the tool question. Sometimes the tool really is the problem. The order matters either way. Ownership first, then tool, almost never the other way around.
The next time you are inside a conversation about a broken system, ask the ownership question before you ask the tool question. If the room cannot name the owner, the tool will not save you. That is the variable nobody names. Name it first.
Erin Peshoff is the Chief Curator of Vivia Studios. She has spent thirty years inside nonprofit operations, helped raise over $100 million for institutional missions, and built Vivia around the operating discipline most strategic engagements skip.
