Accountability

I am con­vinced that “account­abil­i­ty” is one of the tough­est, most con­fus­ing words in the Eng­lish lan­guage. It’s tough because it is thrown around so fre­quent­ly and eas­i­ly as a catch-all crit­i­cism when things don’t go well. A mis­take on the pro­duc­tion floor? Hmmm. Must be lack of account­abil­i­ty by a machine oper­a­tor, or maybe by the third shift super­vi­sor, or maybe by every­body in Pro­duc­tion. Report not get out on time? Lack of account­abil­i­ty by Sales or Finance or you name it. As Peter Scholtes, one of the great­est lead­ers of the qual­i­ty move­ment was fond of say­ing, “account­abil­i­ty is a fifty-cent word for blame.” I mean, when was the last time you heard the word as part of a com­pli­ment to a per­son or a group? “Wow, those peo­ple in ship­ping — they are just so darned accountable!”

And yet, of course, there’s anoth­er side to this. In mak­ing the crit­i­cism that oth­ers lack account­abil­i­ty, we are often try­ing to get at some­thing, some fun­da­men­tal weak­ness or flaw some­where in the sys­tem or in oth­ers. We are look­ing for a cause or a motive or sim­ply an explanation. 

This is slip­pery work. I believe Scholtes and oth­ers were right that throw­ing the word around indis­crim­i­nate­ly does­n’t find that prob­lem — which is often more in the sys­tem than in the peo­ple. What’s deep­er — and obvi­ous — is that the use of the term is often a strong sig­nal of dis­con­nec­tion between peo­ple. When the term is thrown around loose­ly, my sense is it often means “we’ve stopped lis­ten­ing to one anoth­er.” And that can hap­pen for a lot of rea­sons, the great­est of which is loss of trust. It’s a sign that we no longer believe what we hear from one anoth­er and can’t seem to get through. We can’t quite com­mu­ni­cate what our world is like and how much we need them — who­ev­er they are — to do what we need them to do. In this sense, accu­sa­tions about oth­ers’ lack of account­abil­i­ty is often code for a Dil­bert­ian world of silos, shut down com­mu­ni­ca­tions, and self-pro­tec­tion — char­ac­ter­is­tics of what I would call the back­ground “default” cul­ture of Amer­i­can busi­ness and gov­ern­ment orga­ni­za­tions. Hmmm. Pret­ty dark.

And if we want to change this? The answer, it seems to me, is in the rela­tion­ships, the will­ing­ness in the hearts of peo­ple to try to under­stand the dynam­ics of how we are view­ing each oth­er and what that’s doing to us — all of us. Once that’s found, the stereo­types fade in favor of real peo­ple who are dis­cov­er­ing how to care about their work, their work­place, and what hap­pens to one anoth­er. We have seri­ous­ly pos­i­tive capa­bil­i­ties and they can be lib­er­at­ed, but often to get there we have to go through the dark­ness of look­ing at how addict­ed we are to that back­ground Dib­ert­ian world, how it pre­vents us from real con­tact with one anoth­er, which means deal­ing with real­i­ty, with ten­sion, with con­flict in the name of breakthrough.