What happens when no one owns the whole? Organizational fragmentation, unicorns and the future of work

By Vasso Pouli, Founder of NVLoc

Photo by Fox & Hyde on Unsplash 

Fragmented work, lost ownership

We are heading towards a capability crisis, if we are not already there.

We have been so focused on optimizing for speed, efficiency and outputs by fragmenting processes into ever smaller, narrower tasks, standardizing and automating. This has served us well during times when stability was to be expected for both the business and the workforce; the speed at which the market setting changed and thus organizations had to adjust was nowhere like what it is today, employees would stay with a company until retirement, and job hopping was not a thing. But this has had a profound consequence on the global workforce: it is removing the possibility of true ownership, diluting accountability and ultimately stunts people’s professional growth. Today’s workforce consists mostly of task-executors rather than end‐to‐end owners, and organizations keep losing on their ability to manage complexity. The sad thing is that this shift is rarely perceived as a risk until it’s too late.

Ownership requires control

To feel meaningful ownership, you must control a meaningful segment of work and not simply carry out instructions. When one can see the full arc of a piece of work, from problem definition to solution delivery to outcome measurement, they have agency. When you fragment the workflow among multiple departments, each part becomes a hand-off, a check-in, a task to perform, and ownership falls through the cracks.

Workflow fragmentation dilutes accountability

In fragmented workflows, accountability becomes diffused, and ‘organizational fragmentation’ blurs work boundaries, roles and information flows. Then problems fall into gray zones where “everyone assumes someone else is handling it. 

The outcome is that incremental tasks are ticked off, but no one is stepping back to ask if this is (still) the right problem, if we are (still) solving it in the best way, or what we learnt in the process.

With fragmentation there comes a shift in how people perceive their work. Rather than being actors in and contributors to a broader system, individuals become executors of predefined tasks, they expect step by step instructions and hold back from reasoning or trying to understand the ‘why’ behind them. Junior staff in particular are relegated to transactional work, instructions in, task out, and their input suffices as long as it meets the checklist. But they don’t practise system thinking, problem framing, judgment, and informed decision-making, let alone risk-taking. If someone else is picking up the mess, there are fewer learnings harvested for young people, and this means there’ll be fewer professionals who can later step up to handle complexity, connect the dots, manage ambiguity, orchestrate across functions, make sense of cross-dependencies and anticipate unintended consequences. 

The talent marketplace becomes a closed loop

When organizations stop cultivating these skills, the unavoidable result is a capability gap and in turn experience inflation; companies increasingly need to recruit for exactly the skills they lack rather than build them internally, so the job market requires more past identical relevant experience instead of potential. 

The results are frightening. Internal careers stagnate as junior people never accumulate the ownership experience needed, external hires dominate, internal development stalls, and deterministic training becomes pointless given the speed of change. 

In other words, the home-grown pipeline of capability is starved, causing organizations to chase organizational unicorns. That’s expensive, extremely competitive and unsustainable.

The impending crisis: organizations are consuming experienced capability faster than they are producing it

It’s simple math: sooner rather than later, the cohort of people who understand end-to-end complexity will be depleted through retirement, attrition, or mobility. Because organizations have neglected building that capability internally, there is no next generation of people who have been given both control and accountability. The “complexity-handlers” have no successors and that is a real risk for organizations because they lose the tacit capability to hold complexity, learn from past errors, and adapt. Innovation slows down, there are more breakdowns, and this leads to more reliance on external consultants who parachute in with almost identical, off-the-self solutions that rarely yield useful outcomes.

Image generated by ChatGPT

Rebuilding ownership and capability

There are ways to fix this but it requires leadership buy-in, investment in both time and money, planning ahead and getting comfortable with delayed ROI. We are not far from a tipping point, when the cohort of people who do own complexity begins to exit the organizations, and there are no ready successors and not enough unicorns.

It's a good time to ask ourselves and leadership: 

Are we still growing the next generation of people who can hold full worksystems? Or are we just handing out tasks?