What Heathrow Taught Me About Ownerless Processes

In March 2025, a fire at an electrical substation shut down Heathrow Airport for almost an entire day. More than a thousand flights were affected. Hundreds of thousands of passengers were stranded. One of the world’s most important airports, brought to a halt by a transformer.

The interesting part is not the fire. It is what the subsequent investigation found: the fault in that transformer had been detected years earlier. Maintenance had been postponed. Again and again.

When I read that, I did not think about airports. I thought about all the companies I have encountered over 29 years.

Every one of them has a “Heathrow transformer”: a known risk, documented in a report somewhere, that everyone saw and no one resolved. Why? Because the process that was meant to resolve it had no owner. There was a report, but no accountable person. There was a warning, but no decision.

A process without an owner is a process that does not exist. It may be drawn in a beautiful flowchart, ISO-certified and presented to the committee. But if no one has the authority and obligation to act on it, it is only decoration.

The question I ask in every diagnostic is simple: who owns this process? If the answer is a generic role, a committee or an uncomfortable silence, there is your transformer waiting to catch fire.

What is your company’s transformer?