Trying to understand how teams enforce ownership without slowing execution

One thing I've been thinking about recently:

Most teams agree that ownership matters.

When an issue appears, someone needs to be responsible for investigating it, coordinating a response, and driving it toward resolution.
But there's a tension.

The more structure you add around ownership, the more process you introduce.

The more process you introduce, the greater the risk of slowing execution.

On the other hand, when ownership is too informal, issues can drift between people and teams because everyone assumes someone else is handling them.

So I'm curious how people here think about this tradeoff.

How do you create clear ownership without creating unnecessary bureaucracy?

Have you found approaches that work particularly well as teams grow?

Some examples I'm interested in:

• incident response
• operations teams
• engineering organizations
• customer support escalations
• cross-functional projects

What mechanisms have actually worked in practice?

And where have they broken down?