Big Ownership

Ownership is a fundamental of life. We want to know if you take something on that you are going to own it and get it done. These definitions are often seen as very singular and, line up with delivering results. You own the topic, you get it done, you deliver.

Over the years though, I’ve come to think slightly differently about ownership and termed it “Big Ownership”. This is the idea that ownership can be the single task you were assigned, or it can be the whole project success. It can be your piece of the pie or how your piece overlaps with others.

In my engineers terms, I tried to teach engineers that everything should be a Venn diagram. We own a portion of work and want to make sure that we extend that ownership into helping the next team connect that work into their system. We also hope they offer the same back and as a result, no gaps, just a solid chain of working together. This should be some pretty natural thinking if we come back to my fundamental, that we are all working for the same greater success.

So this is obvious right? Yes, but it takes some practice to really embody this when it counts. One of these places is when something breaks. A sign that teams aren’t getting it is blame. They broke. He got it wrong. She made a mistake. People saying these things might be absolutely right, but there are a few quick things to think about. What I’m looking for is trace evidence “I”. I missed checking up with that team. I could have added a few more tests. Ownership in these moments is introspective. How could I have helped prevent this. It’s not that we are looking for self-pity. These are genuine questions of what would I change to avoid this. If we imagine everyone involved is doing this same exercise it is a strong move to collective prevention. Next I’m looking for “we”. We broke, and the root cause is this system. We can fix this problem by changing… We can avoid it in future if… If we think about the Venn diagram of ownership, this is where we start to see the circles overlapping. We want people to think about connecting the dots in a more effective way. We also want people to not apply self-imposed boundaries of ownership creating failure points. If people can peer over the fence and see how their work connects to others, work with them and line things up there will be fewer mistakes.

So in summary. Ownership is about owning the success of your space. It is introspective and in times of need pairs with personal responsibility. Big Ownership is going bigger than your own space and feeling like it is ok to help others own. It is blameless because we share in the wins and the misses, as we work together for the greater success.

A great book that talks about ownership is Extreme Ownership by Jocko Wilnick