For the first few years, governance happens through people. Sarah handles customer data. James owns infrastructure security. When something needs a decision, you know who to ask. Personal responsibility works.
Then Sarah goes on parental leave, or James leaves for another company, or the organisation grows to the point where one person can’t be the answer to “who owns this?” anymore.
And you discover that your governance wasn’t systematic. It was personal. It lived in someone’s head, depended on their availability, and left when they did.
This is one of the most common governance failures in growing organisations. Not because people aren’t responsible, but because personal responsibility doesn’t scale past a certain point.
How personal responsibility works early on
In small organisations, personal ownership is elegant. Sarah knows everything about how customer data flows through your systems. James understands every infrastructure decision that’s been made and why. They don’t need documentation because they are the documentation.
This creates speed. When a decision needs to be made, you ask the person who owns that area. They have the context, the authority, and the judgment to make the call quickly. There’s no process overhead. No committees. No approval chains.
It also creates accountability. If something goes wrong, it’s clear whose responsibility it was. Not to blame them, but to know who needs to fix it and who has the authority to prevent it happening again.
For organisations under about 30 people, this works beautifully. Personal ownership provides governance without bureaucracy.
The hero problem
As organisations grow, personal ownership starts creating dependencies. The more Sarah knows that nobody else knows, the more critical she becomes. The organisation can’t function well when she’s not available.
This turns capable people into heroes. They’re carrying knowledge and responsibility that should be distributed but isn’t. They’re the only ones who can make certain decisions, answer certain questions, or fix certain problems.
Heroes are good at what they do. That’s how they became heroes. But hero-dependency is a governance failure. It means your ability to make good decisions depends on specific people being present and available.
If the hero goes on holiday, decisions wait. If they’re sick, things don’t get done. If they leave, you lose not just a person but all the context and judgment they were carrying.
This isn’t the hero’s fault. They’re doing their job. The failure is treating personal responsibility as if it’s the same as governance, when actually it’s just one person holding the organisation together through individual effort.
When absence becomes crisis
Hero-dependency creates predictable problems. When the hero isn’t available – even temporarily – decisions don’t get made. Questions don’t get answered. Work stops or proceeds without the context needed to do it well.
Attrition is worse. When a hero leaves, they take institutional knowledge with them. The replacement has to rebuild understanding from scratch. Decisions that were straightforward become difficult because the rationale isn’t documented. Mistakes happen because context was never transferred.
All of this is preventable. Not by getting rid of heroes – you want capable people who know their areas deeply. But by ensuring their knowledge and authority aren’t single points of failure.
Why accountability isn’t the same as clarity
Personal accountability feels like good governance. Someone owns the outcome. If it goes wrong, you know who’s responsible. There’s no ambiguity, no diffused responsibility, no “we all own it” statements that mean nobody owns it.
But accountability without clarity creates problems. If Sarah owns data governance, what happens when she’s unavailable? Does someone else have the authority to make decisions in her absence? Do they have access to the information they’d need to make good decisions? Or does everything wait until Sarah returns?
Accountability tells you who’s responsible. Clarity tells you how the responsibility works – what decisions can be made without the accountable person, what information exists to support those decisions, what happens when the usual owner isn’t available.
Good governance requires both. Accountability without clarity creates dependencies. Clarity without accountability creates confusion about who can actually decide.
Making knowledge visible
Visibility beyond individuals is what separates personal responsibility from systematic governance.
When Sarah owns data governance, good governance means someone else can access the information Sarah would use to make decisions. It means the rationale for past decisions is documented enough that someone else can understand it. It means the decision-making authority is clear even when Sarah isn’t available.
This doesn’t eliminate Sarah’s ownership. She’s still accountable. But it removes the dependency. The organisation can function when she’s not there because the knowledge and authority aren’t locked in her head.
This requires intentionality. You have to identify what knowledge is critical, make it accessible, and ensure it’s maintained. You have to be clear about decision authority – who can make which decisions when the primary owner is unavailable.
It feels like overhead when you first implement it. But it’s what allows the organisation to scale beyond “ask Sarah” as a governance model.
Protects Asset Management helps with this by making it easier to maintain visibility of critical assets and their ownership beyond individual knowledge.
Shared understanding, not control
The goal isn’t to remove personal ownership. It’s to ensure that ownership is supported by shared understanding.
Sarah should still own data governance. Her deep knowledge and judgment are valuable. But that knowledge should be documented enough that others can understand decisions, contribute to them, and make reasonable calls when Sarah’s not available.
This is different from control. Control means Sarah has to approve everything, creating bottlenecks. Shared understanding means Sarah’s authority is clear, but the context that informs her decisions is accessible to others.
Good governance creates the conditions where capable people can own areas deeply while ensuring the organisation isn’t dependent on their constant availability.
Moving from personal to systematic
The shift doesn’t mean abandoning personal ownership. It means augmenting it with systematic capture of knowledge and clear delegation of authority.
Start with your heroes. Who are the people the organisation depends on? What knowledge do they hold that isn’t accessible elsewhere? What decisions can only they make?
Then ask: what would happen if this person was unavailable for three months? What would break? What decisions couldn’t be made? What knowledge would be inaccessible?
That’s your governance gap. Close it by documenting key decisions and their rationale, making critical information accessible beyond one person, and clarifying decision authority – who can decide what when the primary owner is absent.
This doesn’t eliminate heroes. It makes them resilient. Their knowledge becomes institutional. Their authority becomes clear. The organisation can function when they’re not there, which paradoxically makes them more valuable – they’re freed from operational dependency and can focus on higher-value work.
When “someone’s job” stops working
Personal responsibility works until it doesn’t. When your organisation is small enough that one person can hold an area in their head, personal ownership is efficient.
When the organisation grows past that point, or when the people-dependent risk becomes too high, you need governance that survives individual absence.
That doesn’t mean eliminating personal accountability. It means ensuring accountability is supported by systematic knowledge capture,
