Ownership Not Buy-in Group Jazz

Ownership is when you own or share the ownership of an idea, a decision, an action plan, a choice.

It means that you have participated in its development; that it is your choice freely made.

Buy-in is the exact opposite.

Someone else, or some group of people, has done the development, the thinking and the deciding, and now they have to convince you to come along and buy-in to their idea — so that you can implement their idea without your involvement in the initial conversations or resulting decisions.

Aiming for buy-in creates lukewarm, pallid implementation and mediocre results.

When it comes to solving intractable socio-technical behavioral problems in systems the notion of buy-in is just not useful – people in the system need to own the new behaviors.

Anytime you or someone around you thinks or talks about buy-in, beware!

It is a danger signal telling you that your development and implementation process is missing the essential ingredient of involving all who should be involved.

Credit: Group Jazz: Engaging Everyone with Liberating Structures

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•  Measures, Targets, Rewards and Punishments When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
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•  Ownership, Not Buy-in We need to move from buy-in to ownership
•  We Need to Stop Trying to Do Things to Each Other And start working together