A committee is not an owner

The change had a plan, a budget and a workstream. It never had a name.

The go-live party happened. The programme closed green, every milestone signed, and the team scattered to their next assignments. I was on the industry side then, at a global bank, so I stayed behind with what we had built.

About a year later the CFO stopped me in a corridor and asked one question: “So where did the benefit go?”

I started an answer and discovered, while speaking, in real time, that I did not have one. Neither did anyone else he had asked. The programme that existed to change the numbers could not point to where the numbers had changed. It had delivered everything except the thing it was initially designed for.

I have spent years since chasing that question across programmes, and the trail keeps ending in the same place: the change that was delivered but never owned.

Everything had an owner except the thing that mattered

Think about how that programme, and probably yours, was structured. The build had an owner, a person with a name whose weekend was ruined when the build was not progressing as expected. The data had one. The integrations, the testing, the cutover, all of them had a single human being attached, someone who could be called, texted, congratulated, or held.

The change, on the other hand, had a workstream. It had a plan, a budget, a slide in the steering pack, and a committee that met monthly to receive updates. What it never had was a name. Ask who owned making three thousand people work differently on Monday morning, and the answer came back in the plural: the business, the network of champions, the adoption board. Everyone, which operationally means no one.

The benefit went wherever adoption went. Nowhere in particular.

What a committee cannot do

This is structural, and I’d rather be precise about it, because committees are not useless. They are useful for exactly one thing: alignment. They cannot own, because ownership has physical properties a group does not have.

A committee cannot be called on a Tuesday night when the operations teams quietly revert to the old spreadsheets. A committee cannot hold a date; it can only note that a date has been missed. A committee cannot take an escalation; it can only add the item to next month’s agenda, which on a live programme is the same as declining the call. And a committee cannot be embarrassed, which matters more than we like to admit, because embarrassment is one of the few forces that reliably moves senior people.

Watch what your own programme does under pressure. A technical risk escalates to a person within the hour. An adoption risk escalates to a meeting that is three weeks away. The governance is telling you, in its own language, which failures it intends to prevent and which it intends to document.

Attendance is the currency committees trade in, and attendance is not accountability. Twelve people nodding at a dashboard is not one person lying awake.

What the adoption owner actually holds

The fix is one named senior person who owns the change the way the build owner owns the build. Not a champion, not a coordinator, not the change manager three levels down doing heroic work without authority. A peer of the build owner, visibly equal, holding four things.

• Authority: they can stop a go-live the business is not ready for, and everyone knows it.

• A budget: the change money sits under them, not scattered as a percentage across other people’s lines.

• An escalation route: when adoption stalls, they are who gets called, and they in turn can reach the sponsor without an appointment.

And a definition of done that has nothing to do with usage dashboards. They are not accountable for how many people logged in; counting logins is how adoption becomes a vanity metric.

They are accountable for the new way of working holding until the value shows in the numbers, which is the only place value counts.

If you want it on one page, it is this:

The adoption owner’s charter
Name: one person, senior, known to the sponsor.
Accountable for: the new way of working holding, until the benefit is visible in the numbers.
Holds: the change budget; the authority to delay go-live; a seat equal to the build owner’s.
Escalation: adoption risks come to them first; they reach the sponsor directly.
First question at every review: who got called this week when people didn’t use it?
Stands down when: the CFO can answer, unprompted, where the benefit went.

Retrofitting an owner onto a live programme

You do not need to restart governance to install this, which is fortunate, because the moment you most need an adoption owner is usually the moment the programme can least afford a redesign.

Name the person this week, out loud, in the forum where the build owner is already visible; ownership that is not announced is not ownership.

Re-route the escalations next: any risk with the word adoption, readiness, or behaviour in it goes to them first, and the committee hears about it afterwards.

Move the change budget under their line at the next reforecast, because authority without money is advice.

Then change one question in the review: retire “how is adoption tracking” and ask instead who got called this week when people did not use it. If the answer is nobody was called, adoption is not being governed; it is being watched.

The committee survives all of this, demoted to what it was always good at: the owner’s forum for alignment, not the place where accountability goes to be shared.

The person who should want this job

Nobody volunteers for adoption ownership, which is worth pausing on, because the reluctance is exactly what makes the role valuable to the right person.

It cannot be finished by effort alone, it depends on other people changing, and it produces nothing that looks clean on a review slide. Senior people read those properties as risk. Look instead at what the role demonstrates to the people deciding who runs the next programme. By that point execution is assumed; what they are looking for is evidence that you can be handed a problem with no work breakdown structure and still be trusted to land it. Owning the human half of a transformation is the cheapest available proof, because so few people bid for it that the field is empty.

One warning travels with the role. Take it only whole: the charter, the budget, the seat. Offered the accountability without the authority, decline politely and say why, in one sentence, to the sponsor. That sentence says more about your readiness than a year of green milestones.

Where this still fails

An owner without authority is a scapegoat with a title, and naming one is worse than naming nobody, because it lets the programme believe the problem is handled. An owner named at cutover is a paramedic hired after the car crash; the role earns its keep in design, when the processes people must adopt are still negotiable.

And when the operating model itself is wrong, when the organisation is being asked to run in a shape it cannot hold, no owner saves it; they just report the failure with unusual clarity. The role is a control, not a cure.

But run it whole, and the corridor question stops being frightening. The build ends at go-live. The change ends when one person can say it held, and mean it. If nobody can say it, it didn’t.

Reply and tell me who owns adoption on your programme right now, or whether the honest answer is a meeting; the next issues get built from what comes back.

Roman

---

---