One Owner per Outcome

Name exactly one person who owns the outcome and give them matching authority and resources.

The product launch has a channel with 14 people, a deck with everyone's fingerprints, and no launch. Marketing thought engineering owned the date. Engineering thought the PM did. The PM thought she was coordinating, not deciding. Everyone contributed; nobody could close, and the work sits at 90 percent because finishing requires an authority no one believes they hold.

One Owner per Outcome is the heuristic for exactly this cue: many people contribute but nobody closes the loop. The procedure: name one person who owns the outcome, not the activity, then explicitly distinguish contributors, approver, and reviewer so those roles stop masquerading as ownership, and give the owner matching authority and resources, because ownership without the power to decide is just designated blame. Named as launch owner, she can now set the date, cut scope, and make bounded calls without polling the channel. The spec's safeguard: ownership is not unilateral power over other people's rights; the owner drives the outcome, not her colleagues' boundaries. The stop rule scales it sensibly: stop assigning when every live commitment has one reachable owner, not when you have built an org chart for things that do not matter. The visible change is that "who has this?" gets a one-name answer, instantly.