Operating Principle
2–4 min read
Ask around and everyone agrees the old system needs to go. It's slow, fragile, and routed around with workarounds. Yet it persists because replacing it is risky, expensive, and disruptive now, while the benefit arrives later and diffusely. Nobody's job description includes absorbing the short-term pain, so the project stays important but never urgent enough for anyone to own.
Operating Question
Why It Matters
Shared responsibility makes the risk and effort of replacement disappear from anyone with authority to fix it. Explicit, individual ownership with protected time is what actually gets it done.
Supporting Evidence
Organizational research on diffusion of responsibility and technology modernization projects
Research Notes
Some legacy systems are lower priority than they appear. Replacement carries real risk, which is why ownership and authority must be paired.
Practical Actions
Assign explicit individual ownership for every legacy replacement.
Protect that owner's time and authority.
Treat a long-standing replacement need as an ownership gap.
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