There’s a version of the Apollo 13 story that focuses on the moment everything went wrong. The explosion, the loss of oxygen, the point where it could easily have been the end.
That part is well known. What’s less talked about is what happened next.
Each person on that mission had a defined area - navigation, electrical systems, life support. That wasn’t unusual. What was slightly different was that everyone else knew it as well.
When something needed solving, there wasn’t a pause while people worked out who should take the lead. The right person stepped forward. Everyone else got out of the way.
You don’t need a crisis to see the opposite of that. It shows up in small ways. A question comes in and more than one person starts looking at it, and then it sits because it’s not completely clear who owns it.
A decision takes longer than it should, not because it’s difficult, but because people are trying to be helpful.
None of it is wrong. It just slows things down.
Most of the time, it’s not a capability issue. It’s not that people don’t know what to do. It’s that it’s not always obvious who should.
There’s a difference between everyone being involved and the right person being responsible. They’re not the same thing.
The alternative is simple – knowing who is best placed to deal with something, and then letting them do it.
It sounds obvious, but in practice it depends on something that takes a bit longer to build.
Not process. Not structure. Just familiarity.
Working together long enough to understand where each person is strongest and where they’re not. When to step in and when to leave something alone.
Because most of the time, the difference isn’t what a team knows. It’s whether the right person is using it at the right moment.
That’s usually where things either flow, or don’t.