Marketing sees the checkout conversion problem. Cannot fix it because operations owns checkout. Operations sees the product data quality problem. Cannot fix it because merchandising owns taxonomy. Merchandising sees the campaign relevance problem. Cannot fix it because marketing owns targeting.
Everyone sees what is broken. Nobody can fix what they see because the fix sits in someone else's territory. The cost of this structural paralysis dwarfs any single operational failure.
The solution is not more meetings. It is giving someone senior enough the authority and political distance to diagnose across boundaries and force the conversations that internal hierarchy prevents.
When accountability exceeds authority everywhere in the system, the most expensive failure is not any single problem. It is that nobody can force a solution.
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