My CV moves from investment management into blockchain, digital identity, technical sales, partnerships and company building. On the page, each move has a date and a title. From the inside, the boundaries were much less precise. Since 2019, especially, I have kept running into the same question: what am I responsible for once the original brief stops matching the work?
A job description gives you a boundary. The work itself is rarely that tidy. A commercial discussion can expose a product problem. A partnership can stall because the incentives were never properly understood. A promising thesis can weaken as soon as it meets the market. Someone has to notice that the original task is no longer the real task.
Where the job description runs out
Titles are useful. They tell people where decisions sit and what they can reasonably expect from one another. I do not think titles are meaningless, and pretending otherwise usually creates confusion. But a title only describes the starting position. It says very little about how someone behaves when the information is incomplete.
The gap often appears when a commercial conversation reveals something the product team did not expect. What arrived as a sales task may now require a product decision, while the people involved are still working from the original brief. That is where a clear title stops being enough.
At that point, taking responsibility does not mean quietly absorbing every loose end. It means stopping long enough to name the mismatch. What did we think we were solving? What has changed? Is this still a problem that the current owner has the information and authority to handle? Those questions often reveal that the task needs to be redefined before it needs to be completed.
Busy organisations make this harder than it sounds. Activity creates its own pressure. Once several people have begun working around an assumption, asking whether it was true in the first place can feel disruptive. There is a temptation to protect momentum, even when the direction is uncertain. I would rather have the uncomfortable conversation early, while changing course is still relatively cheap.
There is a limit to that instinct. Constantly reopening settled questions can become a way of avoiding commitment. The aim is not to turn every task into a strategic debate. I look for evidence that the original conditions have actually changed, or that an assumption important enough to affect the outcome was never tested. If neither is true, the responsible choice may simply be to finish the work.
Finding the real decision
When a brief starts to drift, I try to find the decision hidden inside the discussion. Teams can spend a surprising amount of time debating information when the real disagreement is about appetite. One person wants more evidence. Another is comfortable accepting the risk. Both may understand the facts perfectly well.
I begin by separating what we know from what we are assuming. Then I ask what would have to be true for the proposed action to make sense. This is not a complicated model, and I do not treat it as one. Its value is that it makes the weak parts of the argument visible. If the entire plan depends on one untested belief, we should know that before we commit time, capital or credibility to it.
Finally, somebody has to decide. Input can be broad, but ownership of the decision should not be vague. Consensus is useful when it is real. When it is forced, it can hide the fact that nobody wants to carry the downside. I prefer a clear decision with visible assumptions to a compromise whose reasoning nobody can explain a month later.
Decisions look different when you stay
A recommendation is easier to make when someone else will carry its consequences. The calculation changes when you expect to remain close to the result.
Staying also changes the way I frame a promise. The immediate question is not only whether something can be won, signed or launched. I have to consider what the commitment will require after the initial energy has passed. Who will maintain it? What work will it displace? What happens if the other side understands the promise differently? These are not reasons to become timid. They are part of assessing the decision honestly.
Accountability does not remove uncertainty. I have had to make decisions with incomplete information because waiting would also have been a decision. The point is not to pretend that uncertainty has disappeared. I try to state what I believe, why I believe it, and what new evidence would change my view. That gives disagreement somewhere useful to go. It also makes a later course correction less personal, because the reasons for the original choice are still visible.
Changing fields without starting again
When I moved into blockchain in 2019, I expected the subject matter to be the difficult part. There was a new vocabulary, a different pace, and a set of technical ideas that could not be understood from a distance. Learning that material mattered. It still does. Yet the questions that determined the quality of the work were often familiar.
Where should the next unit of time or capital go? What downside are we accepting? Do the incentives line up with the behaviour we expect? Investment management made me take these questions seriously. Technical sales and partnership work gave them a different setting. Company building brings several of them into the same day.
My experience across capital and technology has therefore felt less like a series of reinventions than it may appear from the outside. The subject changed. The responsibility to understand the market and make a defensible commitment did not. The methods had to change, however, and sometimes the people with less experience in a field could see more clearly because they were not protecting an old model.
Today I am co-founder and CEO of Banza. It is important work and my current role, but I do not treat it as a permanent definition of who I am. Companies change. Markets move. A personal record should be able to hold more than the title on the latest business card.
Ownership is not control
There is a version of ownership that turns into control. I have no interest in defending that version. Doing every task yourself is not a sign of seriousness. Often it means the work cannot move without you.
The harder job is to make the outcome clear enough that another person can use their own judgment. That requires context, not constant supervision. It also requires accepting that somebody else may reach the result differently than I would.
That acceptance is more difficult than it sounds. When I know a subject well, I can mistake familiarity with my own method for evidence that it is the only sound method. Intervening too early may improve one small decision while weakening the judgment of the person who has to make the next ten. Responsibility sometimes means leaving enough room for a different approach to prove itself.
Delegation does not end responsibility. If the brief was vague, the incentives were wrong or a decision arrived too late, I cannot place all of the blame on execution. I need to ask whether the person had the context required to use good judgment and whether they could raise a concern without being treated as the problem.
At the same time, ownership should not make one person the centre of every conversation. If all difficult questions travel upward, the organisation learns to wait. A capable team needs several people who can recognise that the facts have changed, say so plainly, and act within a well understood boundary.
Knowing what not to own
Following responsibility does not mean claiming every problem. That interpretation rewards the person who is most willing to overextend and leaves the underlying confusion untouched. It can also crowd out somebody who already owns the work and has more context than the person trying to help.
Taking responsibility for an outcome is different from taking over the work. The useful contribution may be a decision, a clearer handover, or connecting people who hold different parts of the context. Once that is done, the work does not have to remain with me.
Authority matters too. It is reasonable to ask someone to bring a problem forward before they have permission to solve it. It is not reasonable to hold them indefinitely accountable for a result they cannot influence. When responsibility and authority remain separated, frustration gets mistaken for poor performance. The arrangement needs to be corrected, not disguised with stronger language about ownership.
Some outcomes are also outside any one person's control. Markets turn. Partners change direction. A sound decision can meet bad timing. Taking responsibility in those cases means being honest about what could have been known and what could have been done. It does not mean inventing a level of control that never existed.
A question I keep using
I use the phrase "follow the responsibility" as a private check: did the assignment change while we were completing it? If it did, I want the change named and the owner made clear. That check has been useful across investment management, identity, partnerships and company building. I expect it to remain useful long after my current title changes.