Navigating Change - Process Ownership amid Uncertainty

If you haven’t lived through a layoff lately, you’re probably one degree away from someone who has. Budgets tighten. Teams shuffle. And somewhere in the middle of it, the person who quietly owned a critical process—kept the meetings moving, kept the data clean, kept the outcomes predictable—disappears.

What happens next is rarely dramatic. It’s drip-by-drip entropy. Reports keep coming out, but trust in them drops. People start forwarding old spreadsheets like relics. Slack threads get longer while decisions get slower.

Early in my career I automated myself out of a job. I tied production schedules to purchasing with a rickety mix of Excel and elbow grease. By Monday at noon, my week was done. Then I left. Did the system keep working? For a while. Then it turned into a zombie—still walking, not really alive. Everyone treated it like a fragile artifact. If it broke, who would fix it?

Here’s the thing most orgs underestimate: when a process owner leaves, you don’t just lose a pair of hands. You lose the living memory of what “good” looks like. The cadence, the thresholds, the judgment calls that never made it into a SOP. That’s the stuff that keeps output accurate and friction low.

The turn: in stable times, we tolerate process debt because the owner can carry it. In uncertain times, the interest rate spikes.

So how do you make process ownership resilient when the ground is shifting?

1. Make work discoverable, not just done. If the process only “exists” when a certain person is in the room, it doesn’t exist. Put artifacts where others can actually find them: the runbook in your work platform, the data dictionary next to the dashboard, the decision log attached to the ticket. Discoverable beats tribal.

2. Design for transfer, not heroics. A good process culture shows up as consistency across teams without crushing autonomy. People can add local flavor, but the backbone is the same. If a report rolls up, you can drill down a level and see the process that produced it. If you can’t, you’re admiring scaffolding and duct tape.

3. Anchor rituals to proof. Rituals aren’t just repetition. They’re repetition with evidence. Prescribe the steps, set the weekly ritual, and define the “report” that proves the ritual worked. Example: “Every Tuesday we reconcile pipeline to bookings and post the variance with notes.” No notes, no done.

4. Be explicit about precision. Most reporting fights are really about tolerance. Sales might be fine rounding to the nearest thousand. Finance wants decimals. Both are right for different use cases. State your materiality threshold up front so people stop arguing feelings and start aligning on math.

5. Practice the handoff before you need it. If one person’s PTO can stall the process, a layoff will break it. Do a fire drill: rotate the convener for a month, have someone else run the agenda, let a new voice own the summary. You’ll find the holes quickly and cheaply.

6. Separate value from the person who unlocked it. New leaders love to “move the smart people where the problems are” and end up vacuuming the oxygen out of the process they just raided. When you relocate a capability, you must move the container: the playbook, inputs, outputs, and the expected precision. Otherwise you just moved heroes, not systems.

At the edge of uncertainty, process ownership isn’t a name on an org chart. It’s a set of prescriptive steps, a clear ritual, and a report that makes the invisible visible. People will come and go. Your system should still tell the same story every week.

Process Debt Truth: When a process only lives in a person, change converts competence into chaos overnight.