Ownership

Sometimes it’s obvious.

If I invite my friends for a dinner at my home, I am in charge of cooking for them. No discussion about it.

And sometimes it’s not so well defined.

The more formalized an organization is, the less clear ownership is.

Because ownership is needed at the interface, where it’s blurry by essence.

And in a very formalized organization, people are neither used to, nor comfortable with blurry stuff.

The key enablers to ownership are trust, empowerment and agility.

At the second level, we can add leadership, systems thinking and learning aptitudes depending on the complexity of the mission.

On top of that, the fewer stakeholders are involved, the higher the ownership is. Too many stakeholders(*) dilutes ownership until there is no more, following an exponential law.

(*) by stakehokders, I mean “person who make decisions”. This is the reason why our personal projects never lack ownership, neither traction nor dynamic as we usually are the only ones to decide from A to Z.