Every organisation has a hot potato: a task nobody quite owns, passed from desk to desk until it lands on the person least able to say no. We usually treat it as a people problem. She overreaches. He avoids it. They aren’t stepping up.
If you’ve read the last month of In The Room, you’ve seen this from the side of the person who absorbs the work, in Every time you rescue a broken system, you hide the evidence it’s broken and The people you worry about least can become the people you lead least. This week is the system behind it.
Last week I wrote about decision rights, the idea that giving someone a job isn’t the same as giving them the decisions. This week is the chain around that idea. I use three words for it, clarity, ownership and capacity, and three questions to match. They work in order.
1. Clarity: “What needs to become clearer?”
Not “is everyone clear?”, which only invites a nod. This question makes people name the fuzzy part: the outcome, the deadline, who is involved, what done looks like. A quick test is to ask three people who do the work. If you get three answers, or silence, you have your answer. Until it’s clear, nobody can own it, and everyone is partly responsible for it, which is the same as nobody being responsible.
2. Ownership: “Who owns this?”
One name, not a team and not “we.”
Elon Musk has a test for this. In Walter Isaacson’s biography, he finds plastic caps and fiberglass strips on a car’s battery packs and asks who specified them. Nobody can say. Engineering thinks the noise team asked for the strips, and the noise team thinks engineering did. When they test it, nobody can hear any difference. His rule afterwards is that every requirement must carry the name of a person, not a department. If a department owns it, nobody does.
Ownership also means that person can decide, has the access they need, and isn’t being quietly overridden by someone nearby who could do it faster. Without it, the work drifts to whoever is closest, quickest or least likely to refuse.
3. Capacity: “What capacity would this create?”
This is the question most teams never ask, and it is the reason the first two are worth the effort. Unclear, unowned work keeps costing time: chasing, checking, rework, rescuing, the same meeting twice. Once someone owns it and knows what done looks like, that spending stops. Ask what it would free up, who gets that time back, and what they would do with it.
It also changes how the first two questions land. Clarity and ownership sound like more rules. Capacity sounds like time handed back, and in my experience that is what gets people to say yes.
Why the order matters
If you’re not clear on who does what, you don’t know who owns it. If you don’t know who owns it, nobody can see what capacity is being wasted or who is quietly carrying it. Skip a step and you solve the wrong problem.
Each failure also wears a disguise. Missing clarity looks like poor communication. Missing ownership looks like a lack of initiative. And the capacity nobody got back looks like burnout or poor prioritisation. They are three symptoms of one chain, and fixing a symptom while the chain is broken just moves the hot potato somewhere else.
Try the ownership test
Pick one piece of work that keeps resurfacing. Ask whoever is nearest to it: who owns this? If the answer is a team, a department or “we,” it has no owner. If it is a name, ask that person why it exists. Then ask the three questions in order, and write down the answer to the last one. If you can’t name any capacity it would free up, either it doesn’t matter, or you haven’t been honest about the first two.
Work doesn’t land on the wrong desk by accident. It lands wherever nobody said otherwise.
Which of the three questions do you usually skip? Reply with one word: CLARITY, OWNERSHIP or CAPACITY. I read every response.
IN THE ROOM
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