#OwningIt: Where we are now

What ownership has really given Torchbox is accountability. Everyone here knows that any decision we make can be questioned, and will be, not once it has gone wrong, but as a matter of course, by the people who have a stake in it.

That changes how decisions get made long before anyone asks about them. When you know your reasoning will be tested, you can’t quietly optimise for the easy thing, the cheapest thing, or the thing that suits the people in the room. You have to be able to stand behind it to people who will hold you to the values we say we have.

Over time, that has created a better balance between things that often pull in different directions. In a lot of businesses, short-term performance wins by default, because not enough weight is given to the long view, the ethical line, or the people affected. Here, all of those voices have standing. Decisions about which platforms and partners we are willing to work with, where our money goes, and how we treat people through change all get a proper hearing, because someone will always ask whether we struck the right balance between doing the right thing, the sustainable thing, and the commercially smart thing.

Beyond formal governance, such as our Trustee board, most of it happens in the open. We run a Q&A where anyone can ask anything, and a quarterly survey that takes the pulse of the business, so we hear from more than just the people happy to speak up.

People use them to push on real things: whether the tools we rely on meet an ethical bar, whether to renew some open source donations we had let lapse, whether AI will change the shape of our team, and how we set our profit share. Some of those we acted on. Some we had to say no to and explain why. But none of them just disappeared.

Those questions aren't always easy to answer in the moment, and there are certainly days when I would rather they hadn't been asked. But that’s usually when they’re doing their job. Looking back, the awkward ones are the questions that have kept us honest.

This matters most when the path ahead is unclear, as it is now. AI is reshaping how digital work gets done, and no one has every answer about where it lands. If anything, scrutiny becomes more important when the answers get harder because it forces us to be honest about what we know, what we don't know, and the choices we're making along the way.

It means we can't claim certainty we don't have, or gloss over uncomfortable realities. Being open about the hard things is the price of the scrutiny, and it’s one worth paying.

Of course, none of this is free, and it doesn’t always run smoothly. Open challenge can slow a decision down, drift into design by committee, or simply give the loudest voices a new way to be heard. So, owning it cuts both ways. It means managing those risks as much as welcoming the input. Someone still has to own the call rather than put it to the room. The quieter and most affected voices have to be sought out, rather than only the confident ones. And you have to know when enough has been heard, and it is time to decide.

Done badly, it becomes a tax on getting anything done. Done well, it makes the decision better without making it slower than it needs to be.

That’s why I think the best decisions are rarely the ones that go unchallenged. But that isn’t a leadership achievement. It comes from across the company, from the people who own Torchbox and treat its problems as their own. We are stronger for it, and that, on Employee Ownership Day, is what owning it means.