The finding
Paul Rogers and Marcia Blenko’s research at Bain, published in Harvard Business Review, surveyed executives at more than 350 global companies and found that only around 15% believed their organisation was structured in a way that actively helped the business outperform competitors. A recurring theme in what separated the minority from the majority was clarity about decision ownership — not simply who reports to whom, but who is actually accountable for a given decision when it needs to be made.
That distinction — reporting structure versus decision ownership — is the crux of why unclear ownership is a risk that’s easy to miss. Most organisations have a reasonably clear reporting structure. Considerably fewer have equally clear answers to who owns a specific strategic priority once it’s underway.
The two are easily confused because they’re usually described using the same vocabulary. A person can be genuinely, formally accountable for a function on the org chart while a specific strategic priority sitting inside that function has no equivalent clarity of its own — everyone assumes it falls under the function head’s general remit, without that assumption ever being tested against how much of that person’s actual attention the priority is receiving relative to everything else on their plate.
What it means in practice
Unclear ownership rarely announces itself as a crisis. A strategic priority without a clearly identified owner doesn’t stop moving on day one — it continues to receive some attention, from whoever happens to be closest to it at any given moment, without any single person holding sustained accountability for its overall direction. Early on, this is barely noticeable; enough people are paying enough attention that gaps get filled informally. Over time, as attention naturally redistributes toward whatever is most urgent, a priority without a specific owner tends to receive progressively less of it, not because anyone decided it mattered less, but because nobody in particular was accountable for making sure it kept receiving what it needed.
This has a specific and somewhat counterintuitive property: the priorities most at risk aren’t necessarily the ones anyone considers unimportant. A genuinely significant priority can drift just as easily as a minor one, if it happens to fall into the gap between several people’s areas of involvement rather than sitting clearly within one person’s remit — importance, on its own, doesn’t protect against this kind of erosion; clear ownership does.
That unclear ownership causes this kind of drift is a well-supported observation. What causes the drift to go unnoticed for so long is that each individual reduction in attention is small and defensible on its own terms — someone reasonably prioritised something more urgent this week. The accumulation of many such individually reasonable decisions is what produces the eventual gap, and by the time that gap is large enough to be visible in results, considerable time has already passed.
For how this pattern presents in other kinds of organisation, see other sectors.
Questions worth considering
- Of the strategic priorities currently underway, how many have a single person who would describe themselves, without hesitation, as the owner — rather than several people who are each somewhat involved?
- Has attention to any current priority quietly reduced over recent months, through a series of individually reasonable reprioritisations that nobody has looked at in aggregate?
- In a matrixed part of the organisation, is there a strategic priority that currently sits, in practice, inside no single function’s clear accountability?
More on this topic: Strategy Execution.
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