In almost every operations review we run, there's a moment where someone describes a task and says "well, that's sort of me and sort of finance." That sentence is usually where the real problem lives.
Unclear ownership doesn't look like a crisis. It looks like a task that takes three days longer than it should, a decision that gets discussed in four meetings instead of one, or a mistake that nobody quite owns fixing. None of it shows up on a P&L line. All of it adds up.
The instinct when this comes up is to write a more detailed process document. That rarely helps. Process documents describe what should happen; they don't resolve who's accountable when it doesn't. The fix is almost always structural: naming one clear owner per decision, even when multiple people are involved in the work.
This is uncomfortable in the short term — someone has to give up a piece of ambiguity they may have been using to avoid blame. But teams consistently report that clarity, even when it means more direct accountability, reduces friction more than it increases risk.
A simple test we use with clients: for any recurring decision, can someone name the one person who makes the final call within thirty seconds? If not, that's usually the next place to look.