Systems drift from named ownership all the time: people change roles, temporary fixes never graduate, and an unresponsive owner turns a small degradation into a weekend incident. This episode prescribes the Ownership Ripcord: a minimal, auditable reclaim ritual teams can pull when an owner is non‑responsive or when a service shows sustained operational risk. Mirko contrasts the business harm—downtime, SLA exposure, and delayed decisions—with engineering reality—undocumented tweaks, tacit shortcuts, and brittle single‑points of contact. You’ll get a copy‑paste Ripcord template (trigger condition; required evidence; temporary assignee; auto‑revert window; audit note), three conservative guardrails to prevent political abuse, and a pragmatic 7‑day pilot: identify five at‑risk owners, appoint ripcord custodians on the on‑call rotation, run one simulated reclaim, and measure mean‑time‑to‑repair and unassigned incident rates. Practical, reversible, and deliberately small: reclaim responsibility before the pager rings. CTA: try one Ripcord this week on an at‑risk service and leave a review if it prevented a scramble.

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