It's been labelled the 'Pottery Barn Rule'.
It comes from a myth that the US home furnishings retailer ran an in-store policy: ‘you break it, you own it.’ In reality it never did. But the phrase was popularised during the Iraq War, around twenty years ago and it has been used in geopolitics ever since. Most recently it’s been associated with the war in Iran.
The retail story was never the point. The principle was about responsibility. Intervene in a system and you inherit whatever happens next.
Marketing transformation has the opposite problem.
Plenty of people are happy to help design the future state. Consultants produce the roadmap. Platforms promise the capability. Workshops fill whiteboards with arrows and swim lanes. The change programme gets marked 'done'. And then the new system runs itself.
Only, err, it doesn't.
And that’s because operating models don't deliver outcomes. People do.
Someone has to own the decisions, the handoffs, the approvals. And someone has to manage the gooey cultural mess that surrounds all of it. Bob in Accounts, who quietly fires up his old spreadsheet the moment nobody's watching. Rachel in Sales, who drifts off the Slack channel because she'd sooner stick needles in her eyes than collaborate with Richard in Product.
We’ve all seen this stuff play out - and none of it appears on the roadmap. Yet it becomes the most important thing that decides whether the roadmap survives contact with Monday morning.
This is why so many transformation efforts feel impressive at launch and underwhelming twelve months later. The design was sound. The slides were excellent. But design is not delivery, and a system that nobody owns will quietly revert to the one people already knew how to run.
The gap is rarely strategic. It's operational. The future state was specified in detail and handed to no one in particular - distributed across functions, diluted across calendars, absorbed back into business as usual. Ownership of the new way of working was assumed rather than assigned.
Which is the part worth mulling. Because the roadmap clearly had an author. The platform had an owner. The workshop had a facilitator. But the operating model meant to carry all of it had nobody.
Transformation doesn't fail in the strategy deck. It fails later, in the operating model that nobody owns.
If you’re experiencing transformations that don’t stick as well as expected, speak to us about Waypoint - a free, 60-minute conversation about where friction is costing you the most and what to tackle first.