A simple example could be you asking your lawyer to prepare a contract for a deal. The deal is sealed but when shit hits the fan you realize the contract had huge holes in it.
Your lawyer is accountable for botching the contract, but at the end of the day you signed it so you're the one having full responsibility.
And we have that in spades in our work: you buy a license for a service, they're accountable but you're responsible.
From a cursory glance, it seems like RACI is confused, not you. Any description I find on RACI seems to conflate accountability with responsibility and it looks like a mess.
Accountability means something enirely different to responsibility. Being accountable means being able to explain the reasoning behind a decision to a jury of peers -- literally being able to account for the considerations that went into the decision.
A person is accountable with no responsibility if they expect to have to be able to explain their decision, but they don't have to take personal blame or credit for it.
A person is responsible but not accountable if they take personal blame or credit, but nobody is given the right to question their judgment and ask for details around it.
Accountability is a somewhat bureaucratic idea. We want good reasoning, but in the name of efficiency we don't want people to explain their reasoning when they communicate decisions. We also don't want to give people responsibility, and without responsibility we don't trust them to reason well on their own accord, so we reserve the right to grill them about their reasoning after the fact if the outcome turns out bad. (In fully formed bureaucracies this accounting must be recorded in a long report to be filed away for nobody ever to read.)
> Accountability means something en[t]irely different to responsibility. Being accountable means being able to explain the reasoning behind a decision to a jury of peers -- literally being able to account for the considerations that went into the decision.
That's not how I would understand the word. It also isn't how dictionaries understand it.
Accountability means being subject to punishment. (That is, you can be "called to account".) It is, technically, different from responsibility - the word for someone who has accountability, but not responsibility, is scapegoat.
However, it is generally agreed that operating with scapegoats is both morally bad and bad for productivity (and the same goes for giving people responsibility without accountability), so responsibility and accountability aren't supposed to be separate concepts.
> However, it is generally agreed that operating with scapegoats is both morally bad and bad for productivity (and the same goes for giving people responsibility without accountability), so responsibility and accountability aren't supposed to be separate concepts.
I'd argue that higher management is usually accountable, but not responsible. Like, they can't guarantee fulfillment of the individual pieces of the work, but are still accountable for the whole effort anyway.
(this is going by the dictionary definition that responsibility is "task-oriented")
If that is colloquial meaning I'll play an ESL card and withdraw quietly with a new disdain for the word; it just seems to mean so many and so few things at once that I'm starting to wonder if it's ever the appropriate word to express an idea.
> accountable 1. (of a person, organization, or institution) required or expected to justify actions or decisions; responsible.
"parents could be held accountable for their children's actions"
So, it seems to mean you can justify your decision, which relates very directly to what the parent was talking about. You face punishment if, when called to account, you cannot explain what you did and why in a way that justifies your actions.
In my opinion, their description of the distinction made a lot of sense and provided me with a valuable tool for separating the two concepts.
edit: as I've thought about this more, I do see that the google quote literally includes the word "responsible" inside the definition of accountable, which goes against my point. I still really feel the distinction, especially the with the example of a person responsible but not accountable, seems sound and useful.
> "parents could be held accountable for their children's actions"
> So, it seems to mean you can justify your decision
No, not at all. If you can justify your decision, that doesn't mean you're being held accountable for it. Being held accountable means being punished, whether you can justify a decision or not. If you cannot be punished for something, then you are not accountable for it.
A simple example could be you asking your lawyer to prepare a contract for a deal. The deal is sealed but when shit hits the fan you realize the contract had huge holes in it.
Your lawyer is accountable for botching the contract, but at the end of the day you signed it so you're the one having full responsibility.
And we have that in spades in our work: you buy a license for a service, they're accountable but you're responsible.