Managers can rely on their own reporting line 84% of the time and on other functions 9% of the time; the gap is where ownership goes missing.
Why it matters when the plan changes
Ownership gaps do not announce themselves. Every party believes the work is covered, because each can point at a neighbour who is plainly involved. Managers can rely on their own reporting line 84% of the time and on other functions only 9% of the time, which is exactly the layer where cross-team work goes uncovered. The plan assumes a single owner and the organisation supplies several partial ones. Work continues, effort rises, and the milestone arrives late with no single person who could have prevented it.
The tension is that the fix looks like bureaucracy and is not. Naming one accountable owner, as the RACI convention makes explicit, holds a person individually and ultimately responsible for the outcome, which reduces the number of people who must be in the room. That is the opposite of what a new process usually does. The harder judgement is which gaps matter: an unowned interface on the critical path differs from one nobody needs this year.
In practice
Two teams are merged under a new operating model and the integration plan lists data migration as a shared responsibility. Both engineering leads assume the other holds the sequencing call. Neither is idle and neither is wrong. The dependency slips twice before anyone states out loud that shared responsibility was never assigned to a person, and the fix takes an afternoon once it is.
Evidence
Reliance is high inside a reporting line and low across it, which is where work without a named owner tends to sit.
Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull, Why Strategy Execution Unravels and What to Do About It, Harvard Business Review (2015)Responsibility conventions treat accountability as individual and final, which is precisely what shared ownership removes.
Responsibility assignment matrix (RACI), Wikipedia (2026)
What it cannot tell you
An ownership gap identifies where accountability is missing, but not why: it does not distinguish a gap caused by poor design from one caused by a genuine judgement call about who should hold it. It also says nothing about how urgent the unassigned work is; some unowned interfaces sit safely for years.
Questions
Usually a change in the plan moves work across an interface without moving the name attached to it. Sull, Homkes and Sull's 2015 Harvard Business Review research on strategy execution shows reliance concentrates inside reporting lines, which is exactly where restructures and integrations leave shared work stranded without a named owner.
A capacity problem is someone with too much to do. An ownership gap is work nobody has been given at all. They look alike from a distance, because both show up as delay, and they call for opposite moves: one needs relief, the other needs a name.
Shared contribution works. Shared accountability does not. The workable pattern names one person answerable for the outcome and lists the others as delivering or consulted. Without that single name, the decision returns to the forum that created it and the work waits for another meeting.
Take the plan, list the outcomes it depends on, and ask separately of each who is answerable by name and by date. The 2015 Harvard Business Review study found managers can rely on their own reporting line 84% of the time, which is the arithmetic behind why gaps hide.
Assign the owner, in writing, with the decision they hold and the date they hold it by. Reassigning a decision sits mid-way on the ladder of possible moves, more decisive than clarifying and supporting, and less severe than redesigning a role or changing a leader.