Before you think about who, think about The Triangle.

So there's a challenge. You look around your room of senior managers, you all nod and agree - a TaskForce has to be form! This will show everyone how important this is to us, and we will have a dedicated time slot at our monthly meetings to look at this. Life will be good!

Three months in, there's a spreadsheet with 50 lines of activities. Some moving, some stalled. Some being debated on. But it somehow feels like nothing has moved. Where does this all fit back into the bigger picture? You want to drive the Taskforce harder but where of the 10 people on it do you start with?

Management wisdom like to diagnose this as a people problem. Nah. these are structure problems.

Why aren't your problems being solved?

The first is the stall. Meetings happen. Decks get made. A sponsor sits above the group, which means everyone inside it is waiting (consciously or not) for a signal from above before they commit. Ownership is diffuse. Accountability is assumed but never assigned. The task force becomes a holding pattern.

The second is quieter and more damaging. The task force delivers. Something gets implemented. But it grates. People comply and then route around it. Six months later you're wondering why it didn't stick. When one function owns the outcome, the solution gets optimised for one lens. It was never whole to begin with. The people it affects most had no seat at the table where the real decisions were made.

More is never the solution

The instinct when something stalls is to add more stakeholders. More representation. A bigger room. But a bigger room without a different structure just produces a more expensive stall.

The instinct when something fails to land is to add a stronger sponsor. More authority at the top. But authority at the top doesn't create check and balance. It removes it.

You know the answer - more doesn't mean better.

The Triangle

The Triangle is not three people. It's three functions chosen specifically because they will check and balance each other. At a creative agency, that might be strategy, creative, and business. At an FMCG company, it might be product, marketing, and commercial. For a city refreshing its public spaces, a policy maker, a domain expert, and a city planner.

The functions change. The shape holds.

The Triangle solves two problems at once. Three functions co-leading means joint ownership with no hierarchy. Checks and balances are built in, progress will happen because because there's no one above to wait for. And having three perspectives from the start means the solution will be built with a rounded, robust lens. It was whole before it was finished.

The triangle governs. It doesn't do all the work.

This is the part people miss. The triangle is the governance layer, not the entire team. Around and below it, you deploy as many people as the project needs. Specialists, executors, contributors. They scale up and down as the work demands.

Someone in your organisation can sit inside one triangle as a core owner and contribute to another triangle's working layer at the same time. Same person. Different commitment level. Different hats. That's how the nimblest, cleverest organisations work.

The hardest part

The Triangle is a simple idea. But it is genuinely difficult to keep pure. There's the instinct for all leaders to insert themselves in a Taskforce. There's also an obsession with crowd - more heads means better solution... is three really enough?

For The Triangle to thrive, the space they operate in needs to be protected and respected. The leader will need to resist the temptation to barge in and occupy a seat in The Triangle, assign himself a pretend role ("I'll take on the hat of an engineer!"). Stay out; sponsor, not direct; trust and let go - three very difficult things for anyone leading an organisation.

But it has to be done. I've witnessed and practiced The Triangle many times over throughout my career. It works. The shape matters more than you think. Keep this in mind the next time you're thinking about who.