[HN Gopher] Moving from Blame to Accountability (2017)
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Moving from Blame to Accountability (2017)
Author : yamrzou
Score : 75 points
Date : 2023-05-14 10:13 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thesystemsthinker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (thesystemsthinker.com)
| trabant00 wrote:
| The hubris in thinking arguing semantics will fix organizational
| problems.
|
| The real difference is made by the kind of people who interpret
| mistakes and respond to them. They need to have passion for the
| job, be perfectionists who search to improve their output and who
| take negative feedback as valuable information. That's partly
| nature, partly nurture, but by the time the people get a job it's
| way too late to fix anything, let alone by using one word instead
| of another.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > When something goes wrong in an organization, the first
| question that is often posed is, "Whose fault is it?"
|
| Pro tip: If you have a manager who acts like this, or even worse,
| an org, then it is best to find a better work environment. Having
| said that, these scenarios tend to be in the minority.
|
| One of my best jobs had the department head say to his staff when
| things go wrong: "I don't want to hear X screwed up. I want to
| hear why we allowed X to screw up". Why could a junior employee
| make a change that affects the whole org? What systems are not in
| place to prevent this? Etc.
| markrages wrote:
| This is how layers of process accrete around an organization,
| each to address a previous screwup. Until nothing gets done at
| all, except fulfilling the requirements of the process.
|
| There is a tradeoff between frequency and severity of screwups
| and rate of progress. This tradeoff should be made
| deliberately; just going from "screwups always bad" will not
| reach the best balance for the health of the organization.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Adding more layers of process is not how you prevent the same
| kind of screw up from occurring.
|
| A better approach is to automate the process in a way that
| the manual mistake is no longer possible.
| leobg wrote:
| I find out interesting how the word responsibility is rooted in
| "to respond". Responsible is not the person who is to be punished
| for what happened, but who is able to respond to it, i.e. make
| the best out of it.
|
| This etymology also works in other languages - for instance, in
| German: "Ver-Antwort-ung".
| kubanczyk wrote:
| That's a generous interpretation. My take is that that person
| _must_ _respond_ to grievances in all sorts of ways, and if
| nothing can be repaired at least make the situation bearable by
| lowering their own status.
| TeeWEE wrote:
| I think accountability is in a different dimension than blame.
| The antonym of accountability is irresponsibility or
| indifference.
|
| The opposite of blame seeking is in my opinion embracing failure
| and understanding (as an org) that innovations and progress is
| made by the willingness to fail.
|
| Seeing failure as the result of hard work, a necessary evil,
| causes blame seeking to vanish imho. Together with accountability
| this sets the organization op for incremental improvement. Never
| blame a person. Blame the system or process. The one we made up
| together.
| UweSchmidt wrote:
| Quaint. Who's really blaming anyone these days? Vice-presidents
| maneuvering for power aren't trying to blame honestly in the
| first place, and the old-school bosses who'd call you into their
| office are retired by now. Modern organizations have Scrum
| Masters and Business Analysts with no disciplinary
| responsibility. In general, the appeal to universal truths on
| which to measure the individual is going out of style, and if you
| blame too much people will take it to Twitter or leave
| (exagerrating a little).
|
| Workplace dysfunction (including the blame- and accountability
| issues from the article) is either coming from issues your boss
| knows about and can't fix, or considers acceptable, and either
| way you better work within the given constraints. Any solution
| about a griefing neighboring department will likely come through
| some tacit reorganizations when management reshuffles.
|
| Not saying there is anything wrong in particular with the
| article, or that working through the article can't help if you
| truly want to reform a team; however such a task will require a
| manager with sufficient leadership skills and intuition about the
| true nature of an organization. Such a manager would better not
| put up powerpoint slides about the difference between blame and
| accountability at the end of the next daily standup. It's the
| intangible sprinkling of management magic that makes each team
| member feel understood and challenged to do better, and the
| diplomat's skill of negotiating a truce with the enemy within the
| company that no systems-thinking-article can teach.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I used to work for a Japanese corporation.
|
| When something went wrong, and it was my fault, I was expected to
| take accountability. This was rewarded by not having folks try to
| smear or attack me. It was a simple statement of fact. We found
| the problem, and took steps to mitigate (which could include
| removing me from the project).
|
| No rancor, no name-calling, no status games.
|
| Needless to say, this did not translate to the American
| management, who liked to do a sack dance.
| JanisErdmanis wrote:
| Tangentially, as nonnative speaker I really appreciate and envy
| that in english there is a clear separation between concepts of
| accountability and responsibility. I wish more languages would do
| so apart from English, Japanese as ChatGPT have listed.
| dingledork69 wrote:
| Dutch has that distinction as well. Shows you not to trust
| ChatGPT.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Does ChatGPT ever say "I don't know"?
| ta1243 wrote:
| It claims it will
|
| > Yes, if I don't have the information or knowledge
| required to answer your question, I will respond by saying
| "I don't know" or a similar phrase that indicates my lack
| of knowledge on the subject. However, I will do my best to
| provide you with the most accurate and helpful response
| possible based on the information and capabilities
| available to me.
|
| And sure enough on obvious things it can't know it will say
| that. "What color is my shirt" for example.
|
| The problem is it will bullshit as confidently as the
| loudest pub bore, and while it's sometimes right, it's
| often wrong
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Devil's advocate question: does a blameless culture account for
| malicious or negligent behavior of an individual?
| outlace wrote:
| This is focused on organizations but I will emphasize how moving
| from blame to accountability (or ownership) is a transformative
| stance for ourselves as individuals (as described in Extreme
| Ownership by Jocko Willink). We often try to protect our egos by
| shifting blame, making excuses or just avoiding challenges
| altogether because blame and failure are such a negative
| experience. But instead of self-blame if you instead decide to
| take ownership, where you take responsibility for everything in
| your world, it becomes a kind of game of how you can level up to
| better master the world. You also focus on where you want to go
| and how to get there and stop beating yourself up for not being
| there already. Mistakes stop being so painful and instead become
| welcome gradient signals to level up. You start seeking out
| challenges to acquire more skills to get where you want to go.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| I can speak to this. In one life I am a part time military
| officer with 5 deployments to the Middle East. At the exact
| same time I am a corporate software developer for my primary
| career. The greatest difference between these worlds is:
|
| Leadership
|
| Ownership is certainly a primary part of that, but there is
| more to this than what most people from the corporate world can
| envision unless if you have been at a director level (or
| higher) in a company that is more than a start up.
|
| Ownership directly implies liability. If you fail wrongly this
| can mean losing your job, permanently losing your career,
| losing personal money, or even going to prison depending upon
| the context. Many professions have that, but software does not.
| In fact software directly stresses the opposite of this:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35889282
|
| Leadership means to own risks and liability, but it also means
| owning the welfare of the people that work for you. Another
| primary part of leadership, equivalent to ownership, is
| communication. Good communication comprises the ability to
| provide specific instructions to subordinates so that they
| never must ask for clarity, as though you are using empathy to
| read their minds. Simultaneously it also means the ability to
| persuade peers and superiors to change position on an opinion
| beneficial to your team/mission. If you are good at this it
| will appear almost invisible to your staff and exceedingly
| self-sacrificing to your superiors.
| nimbius wrote:
| I think the takeaway consideration is to select products
| services and solutions that aren't predicated on an assignment
| of blame or responsibility, but based on your own accountable
| understanding of risk as it applies to business and processes.
|
| Far too often are we outsourcing in order to avoid the
| difficult and often times very wholistic concern of risk and
| outcome. Blame serves no shareholder value but to abdicate
| leadership from their post.
| FooBarBizBazz wrote:
| Ultimately, if you are "accountable" for everything in the
| world, then what you must do is establish control over
| everything in the world. Anything that cannot be controlled
| must be shackled and harnessed. Any independent behaviors by
| others must be extinguished; they must be turned into compliant
| automatons to be pushed this way or that by force. Nature also
| must be eliminated. It is illegible; you cannot understand or
| control it; it has to be paved over so that a Cartesian grid of
| parking spaces can be painted on it. Anyone who isn't you must
| be in chains.
| alexjplant wrote:
| > Ultimately, if you are "accountable" for everything in the
| world, then what you must do is establish control over
| everything in the world.
|
| This seems rather extreme. To me "accountable" means
| "accountable for your _reaction_" in this context. I don't
| think (or at least hope that) anybody advocating this stance
| is seeking to "eliminate nature" so much as accept it as it
| is and deal with it on a realistic basis.
|
| As an illustrative example I ride motorcycles on the street.
| It is a fact of nature that people are going to try and merge
| into me or cut me off and threaten my life. Blaming them and
| being angry about it leads to poor outcomes in the form of
| aggressive and dangerous riding. Instead I focus on
| mitigating risk by wearing appropriate safety gear and
| anticipating bad drivers' actions so as to avoid it. I do not
| seek to control others so much as to maximize the value of my
| interaction with them by taking ownership of it.
| diatone wrote:
| Everything in _your_ world. You decide on the system
| boundaries. If you haven't already I'd recommend watching the
| accompanying TED talk
| number6 wrote:
| I take the bait: of course you can't control the weather. So
| you plan to hiking, so instead of getting soaked when it
| rains -- you can pack an umbrella or a poncho.
|
| So who's fault is it that you got wet? The weather? Was there
| nothing that could have been done?
|
| Maybe it's your responsibility to plan for bad weather?
| landemva wrote:
| > Anyone who isn't you must be in chains.
|
| You speak for yourself, not for me.
|
| Those different than me often contribute in ways I did not
| see. Life is better when I embrace improvement.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I see a lot of value in this take, and think pushing it to an
| extreme helps highlight the balancing act that is required.
|
| Also GP's point refers to "Extreme Ownership" by Jocko
| Willink, and from that title it looks fair to effectively
| imagine the extreme.
|
| GP mentions how focusing on accountability changes the
| approach to failures, and I'd totally see people taking the
| wrong lessons from a project where they didn't stop a
| colleague from doing something that happened to be a bad
| decision.
| tmn wrote:
| What is the purpose of this type of reductionist poopooing?
| Are you advocating that accountability is undesirable? Of are
| you just flexing your intellect?
|
| The basic flaw in this thought exercise of yours is, no one
| is actually '"accountable" for everything' with the power or
| desire to enact the consequences you listed. That said, there
| is nothing wrong with modeling that I am accountable for
| everything and accepting chaos theory as a unavoidable
| attribute of the world. This means that me being accountable
| and things going wrong does not necessitate any of the things
| you listed "independent behaviors by others must be
| extinguished" as this is just a sociopathic way of thinking
| on the path to destruction.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| This seems like a great way to develop or exasperate mental
| illnesses like OCD.
| ghgdynb1 wrote:
| you may mean exacerbate
| [deleted]
| 123pie123 wrote:
| I'm accountable or 'own' my designs end to end. which means I
| want and need to help the people or experts who should know
| their job (who sometimes give BS)
|
| Yes I write highlevel risks about the information I'm given
| could be wrong (to cover my backside) but you have to be
| thorough. Its makes you a better technical person or a better
| engineer. where by you dissect and rebuild information given to
| check it's right and to spot inconsistanses.
|
| It's like solving a puzzle, but like a good puzzle it can be
| sometimes tedious, slow and time consuming. but when you find
| issues that could cost hundreds of thousands of pounds/ dollars
| through mistakes it really makes up for it.
| geraldwhen wrote:
| Some parts of big organizations are absolute rot, though. They
| fail to deliver, deploy broken software, and can't be relied upon
| to ever succeed at their jobs.
|
| I have no power to fire other groups, but what I can do is list
| all the ways the other group will fail and how we have to handle
| their failures and what that means for the customer. Those groups
| will never improve, but because I look like a soothsayer, I will
| get rewarded and promoted.
|
| Is this healthy for the org? Of course not. But I am not the org.
| If anyone had my insight a few levels up, they would fire
| incompetent teams and let teams with proven track records take
| over. I've never seen this happen, so I'll hold my breath.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| I've worked in organisations that distinguish between
| responsibility and accountability. If a manager assigns a task to
| someone then that person is responsible for it. However, the
| manager may be accountable if something goes wrong, e.g. if the
| person isn't correctly trained.
| ebiester wrote:
| For people interested in this, look at the RACI framework.
| https://project-management.com/understanding-responsibility-...
| - I don't see it used in a way of moving away from a blame
| culture, but more when an organization has tasks falling in
| between the gaps.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Yes, RACI is exactly what I was thinking about. The
| differences also get people excited when they apply to
| delivery and funding. If you suggest that someone is
| accountable for a project then they may suddenly get very
| interested in it. RACI is also a very good way of identifying
| different types of stakeholder, e.g. when considering their
| potential roles with respect to a new project or capability.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| A book I like on this general topic is The Field Guide to
| Understanding Human Error by Sidney Dekker.
|
| He's writing from the perspective of investigations after
| airliner crashes. His core point is that you shouldn't be looking
| for who to blame in a punitive sense (assuming nothing malicious
| has happened), but rather how policies and procedures allowed the
| error to happen. The human is just the last domino in the chain.
| Accountability ultimately lives with management that establishes
| policies and procedures. But management often does't like that
| idea, because yelling loudly and sacking someone feels like
| you're being proactive, even though in the net it makes another
| error more likely.
| yobbo wrote:
| Article is trying to support a normative argument, which is fair
| and seems correct, with minutia in word definitions and different
| levels politeness.
|
| Accountability is synonymous with responsibility. Identifying who
| is responsible for a failure is synonymous with blaming. We
| prefer to use "hold accountable" in formal and polite settings,
| and "blame" in informal settings, but it has the same meaning.
|
| Using the correct level of politeness and formality is a hygiene
| factor.
|
| "There has been a failure in accountability, and we're looking
| into preventing in the future" can be equivalent to (informally
| and impolitely) "someone here isn't cutting it and we need to
| figure who that is so we can start getting rid of him".
|
| What the article actually means is that the consequences for
| failures in accountability should be measured such that it
| encourages learning, and disclosing problems, and so on. But this
| needs to happen through demonstrated actions, not language. It's
| actually preferable to be blunt, honest, and fair: "someone here
| fucked up; if you can figure who did what, fix it, and coach
| everybody up on how to prevent it, you will be more respected. if
| you hide your mistakes you will be less respected, and eventually
| of little use here."
| atoav wrote:
| It is crucial to not forget that sometimes theblame is in the
| system itself.
|
| If you e.g. push your employees over the limits and tell them
| to ignore all kinds of reasonable safeguards and regulations.
| And then, one day, after a ton of near misses Joe slips and
| falls into the meatgrinder, it would be very easy to blame Joe
| for skipping the safeguards.
|
| But the true reason for the accident was the _environment_ and
| _culture_ Joe had to work in and it might have also hit a
| random different person.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Absolutely,
|
| The most evil variation of this is "we'd rather have the
| increased productivity than spend the resources to actually
| avoid X so our guidelines say they're to avoid X but really
| they're to blame a line worker when X happens so we can keep
| saying we don't want X". See the rash of train derailments
| and toxic spills we're lately now that railroads have imposed
| "precision railroading/precision crew scheduling".
| whitemary wrote:
| Are you joking? In your example, the responsible party is the
| boss, not "environment and culture."
| joe_the_user wrote:
| One factor with informal blaming is it makes it easier for it
| to be done to whoever has less power or whoever is less
| popular, etc. And this naturally leads to people just acting
| defensively rather than making an effort to avoid a given
| problem. At worst, people can incentivized to make other people
| screw-up, 'cause when other people are being blamed for X, you
| can't be blamed for Y.
|
| A formal blaming process means that the question of who to
| blame is decided objectively and people have more of an
| incentive actually act correctly.
|
| And as others mention, blaming the process itself is
| reasonable.
|
| And you're right that the article itself only presents
| accountability as essentially greater politeness.
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| It's both, there are definitely organisations where there is
| blaming.
|
| But it's also very hard for individuals to not feel blamed when
| given feedback meant for improving the process.
| rainsford wrote:
| It's definitely a challenge for many if not most people to
| receive constructive feedback, but my observation has also been
| that few places are actually good at putting such feedback in a
| context that actually feels constructive and intended to
| improve outcomes. Even the most well-intentioned feedback feels
| negative when it appears to suggest individual level
| improvement is the solution to larger issues. And my
| observation has been that many problems in organizations are
| about more than individual need for improvement.
|
| A fairly common example I like that you've probably heard
| before is variations on the story of a junior engineer
| accidentally dropping a production database. Any feedback to
| that junior engineer about what _they_ need to improve on to
| avoid doing that in the future is going to feel like blame no
| matter how it 's given since the underlying causes of the
| problem are at least as much organizational ones.
| Throw73849 wrote:
| I will take blame over accountability. Being accountable is a lot
| of work, that is rarely rewarded. And blame usually does not have
| any real consequences.
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