Organizations assign ownership constantly. Every project has an owner. Every metric has an owner. Every failure needs an owner identified in the post-mortem.
The problem is that ownership in most organizations is fictional. It exists on org charts and RACI matrices, but it does not exist in the operational reality of who can actually make things happen.
When you say someone “owns” something but they cannot unilaterally change it, redirect resources toward it, or override decisions that affect it, you have not assigned ownership. You have assigned blame liability.
What Real Ownership Requires
Ownership is not a label. It is a bundle of decision rights.
Real ownership requires three things:
Authority to change the outcome. You can modify the system, reject bad inputs, or stop work that degrades quality. You do not need permission from three other teams to make a fix.
Resource allocation control. You can decide what gets built, who works on it, and what tradeoffs to make. You are not dependent on external prioritization committees.
Consequence alignment. If it breaks, you face the consequences. If it succeeds, you get the credit. There is no diffusion of accountability across teams who “contributed.”
Most organizations give people the third part while withholding the first two. That is not ownership. That is scapegoating with extra steps.
Why Organizations Fake Ownership
Assigning ownership without authority is not an accident. It serves a purpose.
When outcomes are uncertain or politically fraught, organizations avoid giving anyone real control. They assign “ownership” instead, which creates the appearance of accountability without committing to a single decision-maker.
This allows leadership to:
Defer difficult decisions. If five teams all have partial ownership, nobody has to choose between them. You can tell all five they are responsible and let them negotiate.
Avoid political cost. Real ownership means some teams lose resources or autonomy. Fake ownership lets you avoid that fight.
Create deniability. When things fail, you already have a designated owner. The fact that they lacked authority to prevent the failure is inconvenient but irrelevant.
Fake ownership is an organizational shock absorber. It lets leadership avoid conflict by distributing blame downward.
The Accountability Without Authority Trap
The most common form of fictional ownership is accountability without authority.
You own the customer experience, but operations owns uptime, engineering owns the roadmap, and product owns prioritization. When performance degrades, you are accountable. When decisions need to be made, you are not in the room.
This creates a predictable failure mode:
The “owner” cannot fix systemic problems because they require coordination across teams they do not control. They escalate. Escalation hits management, which does not want to override other teams without consensus. Consensus is blocked by competing priorities.
The problem persists. The owner is blamed for lack of ownership.
This is not a bug. It is the intended behavior. The owner exists to absorb blame for coordination failures that management is unwilling to resolve.
When Ownership Fragments Across Teams
Shared ownership is another form of fictional ownership.
When two teams both “own” the same thing, neither owns it. Both can veto. Neither can act unilaterally. Every decision becomes a negotiation.
This happens most often at system boundaries:
Service reliability: SRE owns uptime. Engineering owns the service. Product owns features that degrade performance. When reliability suffers, all three are “owners,” which means nobody is.
Data quality: Data engineering owns pipelines. Analytics owns definitions. Product teams own source data. Each can break quality. None can enforce it end-to-end.
Security: Security team owns policy. Engineering owns implementation. Product owns user flows that bypass controls. Breaches are everyone’s problem, which means they are nobody’s problem until after they happen.
Shared ownership distributes authority so thinly that it becomes ceremonial. Decisions require alignment across teams with different incentives, so nothing changes until a crisis forces executive override.
Ownership Theater
Some organizations perform ownership without ever intending to grant authority.
They run “ownership workshops” where teams write their names next to services on a spreadsheet. They build RACI charts with dozens of people marked as “Accountable.” They create ownership dashboards that track who is responsible for each metric.
None of this creates actual ownership. It creates documentation that can be cited when someone needs to be blamed.
Ownership theater serves a signaling function. It demonstrates that leadership cares about accountability. It does not demonstrate that leadership is willing to grant the authority required for accountability to mean anything.
Why Fictional Ownership Persists
Organizations know fake ownership does not work. They keep doing it anyway because fixing it requires confronting structural problems they would prefer to ignore.
Real ownership requires:
Clear decision rights. You have to decide who actually controls each outcome and give them authority to act. This forces you to resolve territorial conflicts between teams.
Resource control. Owners need budget, headcount, or the ability to redirect effort. This means other teams lose control, which creates political resistance.
Consequence enforcement. If someone owns it, they face consequences when it fails. Most organizations are unwilling to enforce this consistently, especially when failure can be attributed to “lack of support” from other teams.
Granting real ownership is politically expensive. Fake ownership costs nothing and provides cover when things go wrong.
So organizations keep assigning ownership that does not include authority, wondering why accountability never improves.
The Coordination Tax of Fake Ownership
Fictional ownership does not just fail to solve problems. It actively creates new ones.
When ownership is decoupled from authority, every decision requires coordination. Coordination requires meetings, escalation, consensus-building, and executive tie-breaking. All of this takes time.
The result is decision latency. Problems that could be solved in hours take weeks because the “owner” has to negotiate with four other teams to get anything done.
This latency compounds. Small issues become large ones because nobody could act quickly. Large issues become crises because escalation takes longer than the problem can wait.
Organizations interpret this as a need for “better collaboration.” The actual problem is that collaboration is being used as a substitute for authority.
When Ownership Is Explicitly Avoided
Some organizations avoid assigning ownership altogether.
They create “pods” or “squads” where everyone is collectively responsible. They build consensus-driven cultures where decisions require group agreement. They eliminate managers and replace them with “facilitators” who coordinate but do not decide.
This does not distribute ownership. It eliminates it.
When everyone is responsible, nobody is responsible. When every decision requires group consensus, decisions are made based on who has the most political capital or who can outlast others in meetings.
The absence of ownership does not create empowerment. It creates ambiguity, where power accumulates with whoever is willing to assert it informally.
What Happens to the Fictional Owners
People assigned fictional ownership face a specific failure mode.
They are held accountable for outcomes they cannot control. When things go wrong, they are blamed for lack of ownership, even though they were never given the authority to prevent the failure.
This creates learned helplessness. They stop trying to improve things because improvement requires coordination they cannot compel. They focus on covering themselves: documenting decisions they disagreed with, escalating early and often, and building evidence that the failure was not their fault.
The organization interprets this as lack of initiative. The actual problem is rational behavior under fictional accountability.
Ownership as Blame Pre-Assignment
In practice, ownership functions less as a decision-making structure and more as a blame pre-assignment system.
When something breaks, the first question is “who owns this?” The answer determines who gets blamed, regardless of whether they had the authority to prevent the failure.
This creates perverse incentives. People avoid taking ownership because it increases their risk without increasing their control. Projects that lack clear ownership are bad, but projects with clear ownership and unclear authority are worse, because at least ambiguity distributes blame.
The result is ownership negotiation. Teams spend time defining boundaries, clarifying handoffs, and documenting dependencies, not to improve coordination, but to ensure failures land on someone else.
Why Fixing This Is Hard
Replacing fictional ownership with real ownership requires structural change.
You have to consolidate authority, which means some teams lose power. You have to clarify decision rights, which eliminates ambiguity that lets people avoid conflict. You have to enforce consequences, which requires leadership to actually hold people accountable instead of diffusing blame.
Most organizations are not willing to do this. Fake ownership is easier. It avoids political fights, preserves existing power structures, and provides someone to blame when things fail.
So ownership remains fictional, and organizations remain confused about why accountability never improves.