Setup: The Problem
Organizational transitions are deceptively risky.
- New leadership arrives.
- Roles are redefined.
- Processes are renamed, reframed, or re-scoped.
- And major projects are launched at the same time.
On paper, everything looks aligned. In practice, something more subtle often emerges: a gap between formal ownership and actual system understanding.
I recently found myself in that gap.
I was part of multiple conversations involving:
- Legacy leadership handing off institutional knowledge
- New executive leadership setting direction
- New and existing managers aligning on delivery
- A large, high-visibility project preparing for client kickoff
My formal role was Business Analyst.
My functional reality was broader.
I could see:
- Delivery risks forming before the project officially began
- Ambiguities in ownership that would surface later as failure points
- Missing context among key operators who had not yet absorbed prior decisions, constraints, or intent
At the same time, I had no explicit authority to lead the project, redesign roles, or enforce process changes.
This created a tension that many senior individual contributors (ICs) recognize: Do I step in early to prevent failure—or stay quiet and let the system reveal its weaknesses later?
The Risk of Doing Nothing
Doing nothing would have been the safest move politically—and the most dangerous move operationally.
The risks were clear:
1. Failure Before Momentum – Without early structure and shared understanding, the project risked stalling before kickoff—creating client uncertainty and internal rework.
2. Invisible Debt – Misalignment at the start compounds. What looks like “small confusion” early becomes:
- Timeline slips
- Blame diffusion
- Escalations that feel sudden but were predictable
3. Misattributed Outcomes – If the project failed, leadership would ask:
- “Why wasn’t this flagged earlier?”
If it succeeded through quiet intervention: - Credit would be diffuse
- Ownership would remain unclear
- The same risks would reappear on the next project
4. Personal Burnout – Silently compensating for gaps without mandate leads to resentment—from others and from yourself.
Doing nothing wasn’t neutral. It was a decision to defer clarity at a high cost.
The Solve: Leading Without Replacing Ownership
The solution was not to “take over,” and not to disengage.
It was to shift posture.
Instead of acting as a shadow project lead, I focused on three principles:
1. Reduce Forums, Increase Precision – rather than surfacing concerns in large leadership meetings, I requested a smaller alignment session with:
- The project manager
- The technical lead
- Myself
The goal was not to direct—but to surface shared understanding and unknowns before public exposure.
2. Name Risk Without Solving It – I focused on articulating:
- What was unclear
- Where dependencies were unowned
- Which decisions were still implicit
I intentionally avoided:
- Assigning myself execution
- Pre-solving problems that belonged to other roles
This preserved ownership while making risk visible.
3. Document, Don’t Perform – every insight was captured as:
- A framework
- A summary
- A set of explicit questions or decision points
This created:
- A record of foresight
- A shared artifact others could own
- Protection against both silence and overreach
The outcome wasn’t immediate validation. It was something more durable: structural clarity without political damage.
The Outcome
The project entered kickoff with:
- Fewer unknowns
- Clearer ownership boundaries
- Reduced chance of early derailment
Equally important, I avoided the trap of becoming:
“The person who unofficially runs things but officially owns nothing.”
The system—not the individual—was strengthened.
Closing Insight
Senior-level contribution is often misunderstood.
- It’s not about speaking the most.
- It’s not about fixing everything.
- It’s not about being right in the room.
It’s about improving the system while respecting its boundaries—until those boundaries are formally redrawn.
That kind of leadership is quiet, uncomfortable, and often under-acknowledged in the moment.
But it’s the difference between temporary rescue and sustainable delivery.
One question to leave you with
Where in your own work are you compensating for gaps that the system itself needs to see?
