Responsibility drift
In organizations, responsibility obeys gravity: it flows down toward whoever cannot refuse it. Not by decision, but by default.
A project fails. The experts were in the room. Governance existed on paper. No one lied. And yet, at the end, when someone asks “who made the call?”, no one raises a hand.
This is not an accident. It is a cruising regime.
Organizational gravity
In organizations, responsibility obeys a kind of gravity. It flows downward. It drifts slowly toward whoever cannot refuse it: the project lead without the power to say no, the operator at the end of the chain, the person who gets the 10 p.m. phone call when things go wrong.
This movement has no author. No one decides “let’s put the risk on the shoulders of the person least able to carry it.” The slide happens because no one prevents it. Managers defer the uncertainty. Procedures disguise it as compliance. Org charts redirect it to someone else. At each step the move looks reasonable. The cumulative effect is not.
Why it stays invisible
Drift is hard to see because it looks like normal operation. The system runs. Meetings happen. Reports get produced. As long as nothing breaks, the architecture of responsibility stays invisible, like the wiring in the walls: you only notice it the day it trips.
And when it breaks, the reflex is to look for a culprit rather than a mechanism. You replace a person. The mechanism stays in place. Three months later, another person gets the same phone call.
What you can do
You can answer drift with individual courage: someone, somewhere, decides to absorb the uncertainty rather than pass it on. It happens. But individual courage does not hold at scale. What holds is design.
Designing against drift means making four things visible for every decision that matters: who decides, who is accountable, who bears the consequences, and who owns it. In a healthy organization, these four roles share the same address. In most, they have four different ones — and that is exactly where trust begins to be consumed.
The question “who made the call?” should never go unanswered. When it does, it is not a people problem. It is an infrastructure problem.