I’ve worked at some tech companies which had a very effective answer to that question. At those companies here’s a strong cultural expectation that anything you want to get done should have a known Directly Responsible Individual. As the name suggests, the DRI is exactly one person who is responsible for making sure the thing gets done, and has the authority to make relevant decisions as an individual. (This sometimes goes by other names, but the concept is more or less the same.) If this person is doing poorly they can be replaced with someone else, but there needs to be one person who is ultimately individually responsible and has the corresponding individual authority.
This was probably a formal rule, but the real enforcement was cultural. Everybody Knew that there had to be someone in charge of doing the thing; otherwise how could they possibly expect the thing to get done? Putting a committee in charge instead of a person would have just felt bizarre, as unexpected and transgressive as dropping one’s trousers in a meeting.
This kind of culture can perpetuate itself easily once it exists, but I don’t know how to change an existing organizational culture to be this way, short of having someone at the top with a lot of power and the willingness to use it on this.
I’ve worked at some tech companies which had a very effective answer to that question. At those companies here’s a strong cultural expectation that anything you want to get done should have a known Directly Responsible Individual. As the name suggests, the DRI is exactly one person who is responsible for making sure the thing gets done, and has the authority to make relevant decisions as an individual. (This sometimes goes by other names, but the concept is more or less the same.) If this person is doing poorly they can be replaced with someone else, but there needs to be one person who is ultimately individually responsible and has the corresponding individual authority.
This was probably a formal rule, but the real enforcement was cultural. Everybody Knew that there had to be someone in charge of doing the thing; otherwise how could they possibly expect the thing to get done? Putting a committee in charge instead of a person would have just felt bizarre, as unexpected and transgressive as dropping one’s trousers in a meeting.
This kind of culture can perpetuate itself easily once it exists, but I don’t know how to change an existing organizational culture to be this way, short of having someone at the top with a lot of power and the willingness to use it on this.