> You couldn't just put something down, and walk away.

This seems like a pretty big problem. A lot of tasks should be put down. And, on the flip side, you absolutely need room for people to do things without needing to publicly justify themselves ahead of time.

I've been in places that try to approximate this sort of tracking, and I never felt like they were free of blame, I felt like blame was the default. There's no need to play the "blame game" if the whole system makes people feel blamed automatically!

That said, I've found a variant of this works: give people ownership of general areas, with well-defined but permeable boundaries. You only need to track the details at the interaction points, and only a subset of the work has to happen at those points. This also gives you a lot more room for overlap between people and teams; an interaction point naturally has at least two "owners" and, in a pinch, either side can come up with a (possibly sub-optimal) solution on their own. Or people can shuffle interaction points around—stop depending on one thing, move to some alternative—to work around problems.