As organisations grow, one of the most common pitfalls I’ve seen people try use to get a large group to do something is using broadcast triage… where work or issues are sent broadly to many teams with the expectation that those teams will resolve ownership and self-organise. This is a classic example of diffuse accountability.
Diffuse Accountability?
Diffuse accountability is when responsibility is spread broadly across groups of people or teams, but nobody is explicitly accountable for ensuring the outcome happens and ownership of the responsibility is unclear.
One way to identify it is if you see statements like:
- “Someone needs to look at it.”
- “Please review the list and identify any items that belong to your team.”
- “Each team should review and do X.”
These statements come across as collaborative and inclusive but in reality, they create ambiguity and are rarely actioned.
Problem 1 : It’s Organisationally Expensive
The first problem I have with broadcast triage is it is organisationally expensive.
Simply put, there is significant duplicate effort done by many on work that could be successfuly done by a few.
For example:
- 30 teams,
- each reviewing a list of 40 issues,
- each review takes x minutes,
- means the organisation may effectively perform hundreds or thousands of ownership evaluations…
Most of those evaluations are repetitive. Many teams will review the same items only to conclude: “This probably does not belong to us.” From an organisational efficiency perspective, this is expensive!
A request that takes just 10 minutes per team can quickly translate into many hours of duplicated organisational effort.
The rule of thumb: Unstructured duplication at scale without clear coordination accountability = extremely expensive.
Problem 2 : Nobody takes ownership
The second problem I have with broadcast triage is in practice nobody takes ownership.
When the list is large and sent broadly, individuals often assume:
- someone else will probably review it first,
- someone closer to the issue will identify the ownership,
- or the list will become smaller and more actionable later.
This creates passive waiting behaviour. The larger the audience and the larger the list, the stronger this effect becomes.
While this happens with many situations, it does not always. High-severity incidents where the immmediate impact on the organization is clear like… outages or urgent escalations … often create immediate engagement regardless of ownership ambiguity because leadership immediately rallys to identify owners. But for large operational backlogs, security findings, technical debt, or cross-team remediation work, the probability of delayed action increases significantly, especially when ownership is unclear.
As a result, important work often sits untouched despite being visible to many teams and leaders.
This Does Not Mean Centralise Everything
One possible reaction to this argument is:
“Fine, then one central team should own all triage.”
That approach can fail too.
Centralised coordination models can become:
- bottlenecks,
- overloaded queues,
- single points of failure,
- or disconnected from domain expertise.
The goal is not rigid centralisation. The goal is intentional accountability design.
That might mean:
- a central triage function,
- a rotating ownership model,
- service ownership metadata,
- platform coordination,
- delegated ownership structures,
- or temporary accountable owners until reassignment occurs.
The important thing is that the organisation has a deliberate mechanism for resolving ambiguity, rather than relying on broad, voluntary self-selection at scale.
Broad Visibility Still Matters
There are situations where broad visibility and open review are valuable.
Sometimes ownership genuinely is unclear. Sometimes hidden dependencies only emerge through wider review. Sometimes teams should proactively identify and take ownership of problems.
Healthy engineering cultures absolutely benefit from proactive ownership behaviour.
The problem arises when organisational systems rely primarily on mass voluntary ownership discovery as the default operating model.
That model becomes increasingly unreliable as organisations grow.
Better Patterns
Avoiding diffuse accountability does not require heavy process.
Usually, it requires clearer defaults.
Examples:
- Always assign an initial owner, even if ownership may later move.
- Define explicit triage ownership.
- Create clear escalation paths for ambiguous ownership.
- Default unresolved ownership to a coordinating team.
- Ensure every important initiative has one accountable lead.
A simple principle is:
Multiple teams may contribute, but accountability should remain singular and explicit.
The Problem with “Everyone Owns It”
When everyone owns something, nobody truly owns it.
That does not mean people are avoiding responsibility intentionally. In most cases, the opposite is true. People are trying to be helpful, respectful of boundaries, and collaborative.
But larger organisations introduce a scaling problem:
- Teams have incomplete context.
- Ownership boundaries become fuzzy.
- Communication becomes broadcast-oriented.
- Priorities compete constantly.
In that environment, broad responsibility creates uncertainty:
- Who is expected to act?
- Who decides priority?
- Who follows up?
- Who escalates if nothing happens?
- Who is accountable if the issue remains unresolved?
Without clear answers, work quietly stalls or is ignored.
Final Thought
Collaboration is valuable. But collaboration should increase contribution, not dilute accountability. The larger an organisation becomes, the more important this distinction is.
Because in complex systems, ambiguity does not remain neutral.
It accumulates.
And eventually, it becomes operational friction that slows the entire organisation down.
