A Swedish colleague and I sat down for a long, honest conversation about how differently our two cultures work, not to decide whose way was better, but to figure out something more practical: how could we actually collaborate well across that difference?
That kind of conversation is rare, and I’m grateful for it. We slowed down. We got curious instead of polite. We said the things people usually leave unspoken.
A lot of it kept coming back to one word: ownership. For them, deciding what matters is just part of the work: you look at the problem, you form your own view, and you stand behind it. For us, on the Vietnamese side, it had always been the other way around. Deciding what mattered belonged to someone else, somewhere further up, and we’d learned to wait for it.
It wasn’t a dramatic moment. Neither of us was criticizing the other. But something quietly clicked. I’d been working this way my whole life without ever really noticing it, and I only saw it once I sat down with someone who works completely differently.
The Reflex I Grew Up With
For as long as I can remember, the instinct was simple, and I never questioned it: do what you’re asked, do it well, don’t make trouble. It shaped how I worked, and honestly, more than that. It shaped how I lived.
It’s easy to call that a flaw. It isn’t. It’s a reflex that was shaped, layer by layer, long before I ever had a job.
A lot of it is really about room to fail. I grew up in a developing country, one that came up from war and hard years, and still isn’t wealthy. Just careful with what little there is. When mistakes are expensive, you learn to protect the few chances you get. You follow the plan that already works. You don’t gamble your only chance on an experiment.
In a more developed place, it works differently. There’s enough room to put people first, to treat a mistake as the price of learning instead of a disaster, and to let someone grow by trying, failing, and fixing. So people are encouraged to reach, to decide, to risk being wrong, because the system can handle the cost of that risk.
There’s also how we were taught. Back when I was in school, most problems had one right answer, waiting in the answer key. I got good at finding the expected answer, not at questioning the problem or working things out my own way. What school never taught me was the other kind of problem: the one with no answer key, where every option has trade-offs and the call is yours to make. Deciding was never the skill being tested. These days, though, I believe education has improved a lot.
Then there was the work. For years, much of our industry ran on outsourcing, and it taught the same thing another way. The big decisions about what to build and why were made somewhere else, far away. A spec arrived, and the job was to build it exactly: on time, as asked, don’t change the client’s idea. So we learned to own how well we did the work, never what the work was or whether it made sense. Owning the outcome was never really ours to do.
Two Ways to Finish a Task
For most of my career, finishing a task meant one thing: doing it well. It took me years to see there was another way. Two people can finish the exact same task and mean completely different things by "done."
One finishes and thinks: I did what I was asked.
The other finishes and thinks: I made sure this actually works for the person who’ll use it.
The task is identical. The ownership is not.
I see it in small, everyday things. Give two developers the same task. One builds exactly what was asked, it works, and it’s done. The other stops to ask what the task is really for, and if it’s the wrong thing to build, says so. Same task. A completely different relationship with the outcome.
The Fear Underneath
The more I sat with it, the more I saw what makes do as told so comfortable. It’s safe.
If you only execute, you can’t really be blamed. You did what the spec said. You followed the plan. If it goes wrong, well, it wasn’t your call. Owning is the opposite of safe. When you decide, you can be wrong out loud, with your name on it.
So the deeper question isn’t why don’t people take ownership? It’s what happens to them when they do, and it fails?
When mistakes are expensive, someone gets blamed. A culture that punishes mistakes will train people to just do as they’re told, every time. A culture that treats a mistake as information (something to learn from, not someone to blame) grows people willing to own. A decision that doesn’t work out is just that: a sign of what to do differently next time. I later learned there’s a name for that kind of culture: psychological safety. Where it’s real, ownership feels survivable. Where it isn’t, staying quiet is simply the smart move.
Where Ownership Comes From
I don’t think anyone simply chooses ownership one morning. It’s built, or quietly discouraged, by everything around us, for years before we ever notice it’s there.
And that’s the real reason that conversation with my Swedish colleague mattered. When you understand where the other side’s default comes from, you stop reading it as something to fix and start treating it as a difference to work with. They came to see that doing exactly what you’re asked isn’t passivity: it’s care, reliability, respect for the plan and for the people who made it. And we came to see that they were never going to hand us the decisions. They expected us to make them ourselves, and to stand behind them.