The symptom
Consider an organisation where a weekly report takes an analyst most of a day to produce. It has been running for four years. Nobody has actively decided to keep producing it — it simply continues, week after week, because stopping it was never anybody’s specific job.
When it is finally examined, the report turns out to be genuinely obsolete. It was built for a reporting cycle that ended three years earlier. The people it was originally written for have moved to other roles. Nobody currently receiving it actually needs it. And yet it kept being produced, competently, on schedule, by someone doing exactly what they believed their role required.
This is a milder version of a pattern that shows up across growing organisations in higher-stakes forms too: work, processes and even entire initiatives that persist not because anyone continues to believe in them, but because nobody holds the specific accountability for deciding whether they should stop.
The cost of the report itself is modest — a day of an analyst’s time each week, easily absorbed into a busy schedule. What makes it worth examining isn’t the report but what it represents: a class of activity that survives review not because it earns its place, but because nobody’s job description includes questioning it. In a smaller organisation, this class of activity is small, because informal oversight catches most of it quickly. In a larger one, it can be considerably larger than anyone individually realises, simply because no single person’s view spans enough of the organisation to see the full accumulation.
What leaders usually conclude
The natural first read is that this is simply inefficiency — legacy clutter that accumulates in any organisation and gets cleared out periodically. That’s not wrong, but it treats the report as the problem, when the report is really evidence of something else: that ownership, in this organisation, attaches to doing things but not obviously to deciding whether they should still be done.
In a small organisation, that distinction barely matters. Everyone can see what everyone else is working on, and an activity that has stopped making sense tends to get questioned quickly, informally, by whoever notices first. As headcount grows, that visibility disappears — not gradually and evenly, but faster than most leadership teams expect, because the number of things nobody is individually watching grows with every layer added.
It’s tempting to assume this is a solvable, one-time gap — that once the organisation notices it needs this second kind of ownership, it can simply assign it and move on. In practice, the gap tends to reopen continuously, because every new team, process or initiative added to the organisation arrives with the same default: someone owns doing it, and nobody, by default, owns questioning it. Closing the gap once addresses the existing backlog. It doesn’t change the default that keeps producing more of it.
What the evidence suggests
Larry Greiner’s classic analysis of organisational growth, first published in Harvard Business Review and republished as an HBR Classic in 1998, is directly relevant here, even though it isn’t usually read as being about accountability specifically. Greiner’s argument was that each phase of growth is powered by a set of practices that work well for a time and then become the source of the next crisis — what he described managers experiencing as “the irony of seeing a major solution in one period become a major problem in a later period.” Early-stage organisations run on informal oversight because it’s cheap and it works. Growth doesn’t remove the need for oversight; it removes the informal mechanism that used to provide it, usually well before anything formal has been built to take its place.
That gap is exactly where the obsolete report — and its more consequential cousins — lives. The formal accountability structure still tracks who is responsible for producing things. It’s much less likely to track who is responsible for periodically asking whether a given thing still needs producing at all. That second kind of ownership is rarely written down anywhere, because in a smaller organisation it didn’t need to be.
It’s also worth naming the less dramatic possibility honestly: sometimes an inefficiency is simply an inefficiency, not a symptom of anything structural. Not every persistent practice conceals a deeper cause — some are just work nobody has got around to stopping, and treating every instance as evidence of systemic accountability failure would overstate what a single obsolete report actually tells you.
A common misconception worth naming directly is that accountability gaps are primarily a discipline problem — that if people simply cared more or paid closer attention, obsolete work would get caught sooner. The evidence points somewhere less personal: the analyst producing the report was doing their job conscientiously the entire time. The gap wasn’t in anyone’s diligence. It was in the absence of a distinct kind of ownership — for periodically questioning whether the work should continue — that smaller organisations don’t need to formalise and larger ones often never get around to.
For how this pattern presents in other kinds of organisation, see other sectors.
Questions worth considering
- Which established activities in the organisation would survive being questioned today, and which would simply stop the moment someone asked why they still happen?
- Is there a role — formal or informal — whose job includes noticing when something has quietly stopped making sense?
- As the organisation has grown, has anyone deliberately replaced the informal oversight that used to catch this, or has that gap simply been left open?
More on this topic: Strategy Execution.
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