[zkmon]

Let's say we got someone to be accountable for something. And that something has failed horribly. Now what?

Infact, the first problem would be to identify whether something is a success or failure. This is tough, as anything can be dressed up as success, attributing any negatives to the external factors. Any determination (success or not) would mostly go by perceptions people have on other people, but not really by what happened on the ground, unless it is so glaring or media made a fuss about it.

Assuming it was somehow classified as a failure, the next bigger issue to identify whom to blame. At this point, it would fizzle out with a circular to everyone stating a new policy or general guidance, without naming anyone.

Let's say we have a rare instance where a person was named as accountable for the failure. Mostly likely it will be shown as team decisions and team work that resulted in failure. Can the entire team be fired? No way. Infact the team would be rewarded for going through such crisis situation that got high visibility.

Most preachings about accountability and responsibility do not go into how to actually use them in the aftermath of a failure or success.

[phoe-krk]

> Assuming it was somehow classified as a failure, the next bigger issue to identify whom to blame.

Accountability is to gain introspection about the past and intermediate states of an (interpersonal) system to figure out what decisions were made by whom, when, how, and in which context, so that they be analyzed and similar failures or whole failure mores can be avoided in the future.

It isn't the ability to properly find a scapegoat. You don't make people accountable to be able to fire them. You can fire them regardless. You make them accountable so that they have the ability to produce an account of what, how, and why happened at a given time.

[zkmon]

>> You make them accountable so that they have the ability to produce an account of what, how, and why happened at a given time.

The very first line in the Wikipeda article on Accountability states that "accountability is equated with answerability, culpability, liability".

Are you saying a person who is accountable may not be held responsible for the outcomes?

[phoe-krk]

> Are you saying a person who is accountable may not be held responsible for the outcomes?

No, please re-read what I said. I said that it's not about finding a scapegoat to fire, but about understanding what, where, and why happened. If you don't have an account of a problem, then you don't know where the problem is located; even if it should be solved by firing someone, then you don't have the tools to figure out who and why needs to be fired.

[firesteelrain]

The person you are replying to describes something akin to retrospective but even in Agile we still have people who need to be accountable and that includes the engineers too.

[DrewADesign]

Assuming you’re earnestly not seeing how this works rather than seeking an argument:

I work in an industry where accountability is the norm. Individual people perform well-known, but difficult-to-execute steps of various processes; strict metrics define success and failure; close calls are not ideal; and the distance between success and failure is usually not revealed without precisely calibrated equipment. The ways to measure the outcomes are legally codified. Everything can be checked and double-checked, and people can, and often do, check those checks. Even then, sometimes the person that determined the metrics got them wrong. Sometimes it was measured wrong. Sometimes the person that said it was wrong turns out to be wrong. My primary professional function is to determine adherence to those standards. Potentially thousands of lives are at stake if we get the wrong thing wrong enough.

With a sane commit history and code reviews, this is a lot easier in software than it is in most realms. It’s definitely easier than mine.

Accountability isn’t just about failure— it’s about owning outcomes and giving an account of what you did to contribute to that outcome, good or bad.

> answerability, culpability, liability

You left off the end of the sentence.

> equated with answerability, culpability, liability, and the expectation of account-giving.

Account-giving is the key, here.

Since we’re focusing on problems: mistakes have different causes: being careless, having outdated knowledge, having the wrong requirements, physical or mental problems, equipment malfunctioning, bad processes… to identify the root problem, you need an account of what happened. To get that, you need to identify the person or people involved, and figure out what went wrong. That’s the only way you’re going to mature enough organizationally to have any semblance of quality. As the saying goes: if everybody’s responsible for something, then nobody’s responsible for it. The distinction is accountability.

So you don’t need to fire someone to hold them accountable— even being ‘in trouble’ every time someone does something wrong is counterproductive if it makes people hide or shirk responsibility for their mistakes. If someone fucks up badly or frequently enough, then maybe they are in trouble, and maybe they do get fired? But there’s a whole hell of a lot accountability that happens before that.

People make mistakes, and any organization that does not tolerate mistakes is run by people without the emotional maturity required to properly run an organization. The same is true of people unwilling to identify those mistakes and figure out either how they can be avoided in the future, or if they can’t be reliably avoided, mitigate their effects. Some of the leadership’s primary responsibilities involve defining the desired outcome, measuring the difference between it and the actual outcome, determining if/how it matters, and figuring out why it’s different. Those that refuse to address, or even acknowledge problems (and again, it doesn’t have to be punitive,) are masking their own laziness or incompetence.