One of the biggest mistakes I made running my teams and companies was not implementing the idea of a directly responsible individual (DRI) sooner.
I first read about it a few months ago — it's how Apple structured their organization.
The concept maps onto a well-documented phenomenon in psychology: diffusion of responsibility. The more people who share ownership of something, the less any single person feels accountable for it.
The DRI model is the antidote. For everything that needs doing, you assign one person who is directly responsible for it. Or to put it more bluntly: who do I call when that thing isn't working?
Importantly, this doesn't mean the DRI does the work alone, or is even the primary contributor. They might coordinate a team of ten. The point is to eliminate ambiguity about who owns the outcome — not the tasks, but the result.
Now, whenever we define a project, initiative, or process at Acta, I make the team name the DRI upfront. No exceptions.
The problem this solves is what I call the "group ownership" fallacy — the intuition that spreading responsibility across a team creates shared commitment.
In practice, it does the opposite. When everyone is responsible, no one is. Tasks slip through the cracks. Deadlines drift. And performance suffers — not because people are lazy, but because the accountability structure is broken.