The change is agreed. The ownership isn’t.
This one is usually well understood before we arrive. The leadership team knows what needs to happen, the case has been made and often approved, and the initiative still has not started. The open question is who carries it: everyone senior enough is already accountable for something the company cannot afford to drop, the mandate to cut across functions has not been granted to anyone in particular, and where the change calls for a specific depth of expertise, that depth is committed elsewhere.
The shape of the change varies. The ownership question does not.
- AI and automation adoption, past the pilot and into how the company actually works.
- Operating model redesign, where the change touches every function at once.
- Major cross-functional initiatives with no natural single owner.
- Organisational transition, including changes in how leadership itself operates.
- A new market or a change in go-to-market motion.
- Restructuring ways of working across teams that have grown apart.
The people best placed to lead it are the people already carrying the business.
Assigning it to them means something else slips, so the work goes to a committee instead, or to someone given the task without the mandate, or into next quarter. High-stakes change stalls at the ownership question far more often than at the design.
Is there a change waiting on an owner?
Tell us what’s stuck →Ownership that is real.
Someone senior carrying the change, with the mandate to make decisions stick across functions, and the specific depth the change calls for. We lead or co-lead the work and stay accountable for the quality of the intervention and its delivery. Where the change needs expertise the company does not have spare, we bring in a senior specialist and integrate them into the work rather than handing over a referral.
How the expertise gets selected: the expert network. How engagements run: diagnose, design, deliver.