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by toss1
916 days ago
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This entire exercise seems wrong, or at best, incomplete. There's a Japanese saying that I found useful: "Fix the problem, not the blame." This "accountability" exercise seems here to be viewed as: 'fix the blame in advance'. Instead, the focus should be to identify the potential problems and reduce the risk that they will occur or mitigate the consequences. "Accountability" should only be a tertiary tool to generate action to reduce risk or mitigate consequences. |
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That's not what "accountability" means. "Accountability" means "who has the ultimate say on what counts as success". In other words, the accountable person has to be a final decision maker: someone who has the authority to say "yes, the task is done" or "no, the task is not done".
That's why it doesn't make sense to put a 3rd party as accountable: they can't possibly be a final decision maker for your company. Someone in your company has to be the one to say whether the task is done or not.
In other words, the article's point is that viewing "accountability" as "who we'll blame if the task fails"--and thus being fine with saying "this 3rd party", as in "we'll just blame this 3rd party if the task fails"--is a bug, not a feature.