WHO OWNS WHAT
The reorg meeting starts with sticky notes and a wall. Six people sit around the table and start naming the work the organization actually does. The development director has been running events since March, when the events manager moved on, although her job description still says nothing about events. The communications associate has been pulling reports for the board packet because the database coordinator was reassigned two reorgs ago. The CEO has been making donor cultivation calls she said she would stop making last year. By the time the wall is full, more than a third of the sticky notes have nobody’s name on them. The work is happening. The accountability is not.
This is what growth and turnover do to a role structure that was drawn when the organization was smaller. Bloomerang’s reporting on development director tenure puts the average in the eighteen-month range. The Center for Effective Philanthropy 2026 State of Nonprofits report finds workforce exhaustion is now the primary driver of departures. Each departure leaves a quiet residue: the work the person was doing that was not in their job description, the institutional knowledge they were holding, and the assumptions about who would do the work next. The org chart on the wall is current. The work being done is not what the org chart describes.
For a nonprofit growing quickly or absorbing the departure of a long-tenured staff person, the surface symptom is usually a missed handoff or a duplicated effort. The underlying issue is that ownership has not been redrawn to match what the organization actually needs now. Years ago I was helping an organization implement Salesforce. One staff member was openly hostile to the project in every meeting. When I finally sat down with her, what came out was not resistance to the software. It was that her institutional knowledge had been her safety, and the new system was going to make that knowledge transferable. For a consultant doing org design or change management, the same dynamic plays out at scale: a structure on paper that the people inside the structure cannot find themselves in.
What Vivia Studios builds inside Defined Ownership is the literal sticky-note exercise: every workstream on the wall, every role in the room, every gap named out loud. Then the matrix: who decides, who does, who is consulted, who is informed. The output is a roles and responsibilities document the team can hold each other accountable to, written for where the organization is now and where it is going, not where it was when the previous chart was drawn. We also build the cultural piece underneath: making it safe to put knowledge into shared systems, because the people holding it know what their seat in the new structure actually is. For consulting firms scoping operational or organizational engagements, the same approach: name the gaps before the strategy, not after.
If a reorg, a departure, or rapid growth has surfaced the question of who owns what, the next move is a thirty-minute conversation about what the sticky-note exercise would look like for your team.
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.
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