There’s a particular kind of dysfunction that sets in when nobody is quite sure who owns what. It’s not dramatic. It’s not a crisis. It’s just a low hum of inefficiency that makes everything take longer than it should.
A customer emails support with a technical question. The support person isn’t sure if they should escalate it to the product team or the engineering team. They ask the product manager. The product manager thinks it’s actually a customer success question. Customer success says it’s technical. Meanwhile the customer waits. Three days later someone finally answers because nobody was clear about who actually owned the problem.
A decision needs to be made about a new process. The operations person proposes something. The finance person thinks they should have a say. The product person has opinions. They all sort of discuss it but nobody’s clear on who gets to decide. So it doesn’t. The decision stalls. Eventually something happens but nobody’s quite sure who made it or if it’s final or if someone’s going to overturn it next week.
Work duplicates. Two people do the same thing because neither realised someone else was already doing it. Or something important doesn’t happen because everyone thought someone else was handling it. When something goes wrong, there’s finger-pointing because there’s no clean accountability. Who was supposed to check this? Who was responsible for that? “I thought you were handling it.” “I thought you were handling it.”
The issue is that ambiguity creates a vacuum that people fill with assumptions. And everyone’s assumptions are slightly different. Everyone thinks someone else owns something. Everyone thinks something is someone else’s responsibility. The org chart says one thing but the actual decision-making power lives somewhere else. There’s a formal process but people ignore it and just make decisions ad hoc.
The cost of this is invisible until you start paying attention to it. Look at the time people spend in meetings trying to figure out who should do something. Look at the rework when something has to be redone because the person who did it wasn’t actually supposed to. Look at the decisions that never happen because nobody’s clear on who owns them. Look at the talented people who leave because they were never quite sure if they were succeeding or failing.
RACI matrices get a bad rap. People bring them up and everyone groans. I’ve seen bad RACI matrices that are worse than nothing — massive spreadsheets where everything is someone’s responsibility, or where the same person is Accountable for seventeen different things, or where being “Consulted” means you’ve got veto power and nothing ever moves because every decision requires consensus from the entire organisation.
But the underlying principle of RACI is correct. There should be one person who is Responsible for doing the work. One person who is Accountable if it doesn’t get done (and that’s often not the same person). Some people who need to be Consulted because they have expertise. Some people who need to be Informed because they need to know it happened.
The key word is “one.” One person Responsible. One person Accountable. Not three people all responsible for something. Not everyone responsible and therefore nobody actually responsible. One person.
Where RACI fails is when it’s done as a compliance exercise. Someone creates a spreadsheet, everyone fills in their guess about what they do, nobody looks at it again. Or it gets created but the culture doesn’t actually respect it. Someone’s supposed to be the Accountable owner but everyone ignores them and goes to the person who they actually trust or like. The matrix doesn’t reflect how power actually flows in the organisation.
The cultural shift required is that people have to actually respect the role clarity. If someone’s Accountable for something, they get the final say. Not because they’re the smartest or the most senior but because that’s how the organisation has decided to work. This is genuinely uncomfortable for a lot of people. It means not doing things your way. It means accepting that someone else owns something and you don’t get to control it.
It also means that whoever’s Accountable actually has to own it. They can’t just disappear and let it fail and blame someone else. They have to feel responsible in a real way. This is harder than it sounds. A lot of people want the prestige of owning something without actually owning the accountability. They want to be Accountable for the decision if it goes well but Responsible for just the nice parts if it goes badly.
Actually functioning clarity means that if something under your Accountability fails, you own it. Not in a humiliating way. In a “let’s talk about what happened and how we prevent it next time” way. But it’s still yours to own.
The practical fix is to actually do the work of clarifying roles. Not the spreadsheet. The work. Sit down and talk about what each person actually does. What decisions are theirs. What decisions they need to consult on. What they need to be informed about. What they’re doing that someone else thought they were doing. What’s falling through gaps.
This is genuinely useful in a one-person company. It’s essential in a company that’s bigger than a few people.
Then you make it explicit. You write it down. Not as a massive RACI matrix. As actual role descriptions. Maybe it’s a document. Maybe it’s a conversation that gets documented. Maybe it’s a series of decisions about specific workflows. The format doesn’t matter. The clarity matters.
You also have to maintain it. When someone leaves, you don’t just leave their role undefined. You figure out who’s going to be Accountable for the things they were Accountable for. When the company changes, you revisit who owns what. A lot of organisations treat this as a one-time project and then wonder why clarity erodes.
The organisations that get this right usually have a person who cares about organisational design. Not a lot of companies have this as a dedicated role, but someone functions that way. They notice when there’s ambiguity. They push back on “well, we’ll figure it out as we go.” They regularly ask “who actually owns this?” and make sure the answer is clear.
They also create a culture where it’s okay to ask for clarity. Where someone can say “I’m not clear on my role” and that’s not a sign of weakness or disengagement. It’s taken seriously and addressed.
The payoff is massive. Decisions move faster. Work doesn’t duplicate. Important things don’t fall through gaps. People know if they’re succeeding because they know what they’re supposed to be doing. Accountability is clean. When something goes wrong, you figure out what happened without devolving into finger-pointing because it’s already clear who was responsible for what.
It’s not exciting. It doesn’t show up in a product launch or a company announcement. But it’s the invisible infrastructure that lets good companies function without the constant low hum of “whose job is this again?” friction that drains everyone’s energy.
If your company feels like everything takes twice as long as it should, or important things keep falling through gaps, or meetings are mostly about figuring out who should do things instead of actually doing things — unclear roles are probably part of the problem. The fix is uncomfortable. You have to actually name who owns what. But once you do, you can stop wasting energy on the ambiguity and start using it for something that matters.