Nobody Owned The Outcome
During my annual review at Wheels Up, my boss asked what I wanted to learn that I wasn't currently doing. It was a genuine question, not a formality. I said I wanted to be a fly on the wall in his role.
He was the CHRO and he was about to start a significant piece of organizational development work. When he mentioned it, I asked if he'd teach me while he did it.
That's how the OD bootcamp was born. One student, one teacher, one real problem to solve. It was in depth in a way that a formal program never would have been — because I wasn't learning concepts in the abstract. I was learning while the work was actually happening. As word spread to my HR colleagues, more people asked to join, and it grew. But I was the only one there from the beginning and seemingly, the most invested.
What I didn't anticipate was that somewhere in the middle of being taught, I would start asking questions my teacher hadn't thought to ask yet. That's when I knew something had shifted.
The business problem we were trying to solve was straightforward: the company needed to become profitable. The strategic answer seemed equally clear: grow revenue while controlling costs. But when we started mapping the value chain and assessing where the organization actually had the capability to execute, the picture got more complicated.
"Nobody owned the outcome."Demand generation — the single most critical capability for a company trying to grow revenue — had no single owner.
Revenue management & pricing sat in one function. So did fleet quoting. Customer insights and marketing execution lived somewhere else entirely. Scheduling sat in operations. Sales had its own leader. These were not informal working relationships or dotted-line arrangements. These were distinct executive-level functions, each with its own leader, its own priorities, and its own definition of what success looked like. The capability existed across multiple executives with multiple agendas. Nobody owned the outcome.
When you map that on paper, it's almost disorienting how clear it is. Of course the company struggled to drive profitable revenue growth. No one was accountable for the end-to-end capability. Everyone was accountable for their piece, which is a completely different thing.
The recommendation was structural: consolidate ownership of the full demand generation chain under a single commercial leader. Redefine the finance function around enterprise strategy and planning. Convert the operations leadership role into what it actually needed to be — focused exclusively on execution. Clean lines. Single points of accountability. A structure that matched what the business was actually trying to do.
As the work evolved, it grew in scope to touch hundreds of employees and significant cost across sales, fulfillment, and service delivery. The diagnosis was sound. The recommendation was clear. We presented it to the executive team.
And that's where it got interesting.
What happened next was not unique to this company. I've since come to understand that it happens in some form in most organizations when OD work does its job correctly. The work surfaced the truth and the truth was uncomfortable. And the people whose authority, resources, and organizational territory were implicated in the diagnosis responded accordingly.
Two camps formed almost immediately. One circled the wagons — leaders defending their current structures, justifying their headcount, framing the diagnosis as a misunderstanding of what their teams actually did. The other saw an opening — leaders angling for expanded scope, more resources, greater control under the new model. Neither camp was particularly interested in the question the work had actually tried to answer: what does the business need to be able to do, and how should we be organized to do it?
I watched in real time what executive politics actually looks like when the stakes are real and change is uncomfortable. New roles started appearing in conversations that had nothing to do with the original diagnosis. The restructuring that had been recommended clearly and documented thoroughly was still being debated when I left the company.
I don't tell this story as a failure. The map was right. The fact that people fought over the territory it described doesn't change the accuracy of the diagnosis. Some of the most valuable work I've ever been part of produced no immediate visible outcome — because the value was in making the problem legible, even to people who'd rather it stayed blurry.
Here's what I took from it: OD surfaces the truth. What organizations do with it is a leadership decision, not an OD outcome. The practitioner's job is to make the diagnosis honest and the path forward clear. The organization decides whether to walk it.
"OD surfaces the truth. What organizations do with it is a leadership decision, not an OD outcome."I came out of that experience knowing how to do this work. Not as theory — as practice, at the executive level, with real stakes and real resistance. I was already in the room with that leadership team in other programs, comfortable directing those conversations and the OD work was an extension of that, not an introduction to it.
The question I learned to start with — what are you trying to accomplish, and how can I help?— sounds simple. It isn't. It's the question that cuts through the org chart and the politics and the role descriptions and gets to the actual problem. Everything else in OD methodology exists to help you answer it honestly.
That, it turns out, is harder than it looks. And more necessary than most organizations want to admit.
This is the kind of thing I think about. If it resonates, there's more where it came from — or let's talk.
