Accountability sinks

I was thinking about something similar today. Sometimes accountability can be a blocker, for example for hiring.

If you have 1 candidate, it's an easy call, if you have 3 candidates, you evaluate in less than a week. If you have 200 candidates, you need to hire somebody to sift through the resumes, have like 5 rounds on interview and everybody chiming in, whoever pulls the trigger or recommends someone is now on the hook for their performance.

You can't evaluate all the information and make an informed decision, the optimal strategy is to flip a 100 sided die, but no one is going to be on the hook for that.

> If you have 200 candidates, you need to hire somebody to sift through the resumes, have like 5 rounds on interview and everybody chiming in, whoever pulls the trigger or recommends someone is now on the hook for their performance.

That's not how accountability works, in the traditional sense.

What you described is Person A (accountable for hiring) hiring person B (responsible for screening and evaluating candidates). Person A is still accountable for the results of Person B. If Person B hired a sh*t candidate, it still lands on Person A for not setting up an adequate hiring system.

Being accountable for something doesn't forbid you from delegating to other people. It is very common for 1 person to be accountable for multiple people's work.

heh never works that way. an experienced bureucrat like you describe always has a shit-deflecting canopy. so whatever decisions he personally took are never attributable to him personally.

it just so happened.

You can still be on the hook for rolling a 100 sided die. And in some cases that's effectively all you can do. At the end of the day it's a trolley problem (the real one, not deciding between two bad things, but looking at how people typically define reponsibility)

One way or another you gotta own the decisions you make and deal with it. Even if the decision is to let someone else make the decision.

The issue is that, yes, absolving yourself of accountability sure does free you to scale in ways previously thought unimaginable, it doesn't mean you absolve yourself of responsibility. The cure is keeping accountability in favor of scaling which means a much smaller scale to everything we have been doing.

Another way to think about it. If you said you would give me 1 million dollars but I had to fully own up to what 1000 random people do in the next 24 hours I'd say thats a pretty raw deal. Basically no chance that a million will cover the chaos that a few of those 1000 people could cause. What some people do is take the million and then figure out how to rid themselves of the reponsibility.

That's what TFA is saying, and they call it an accountability sink.

what you’re describing is not someone who is accountable for something.

In the hiring example, perhaps the person A stops being accountable for hiring someone successful in the role, and rather they are accountable for successfully hiring persons B who is capable of hiring someone to fill the role.

Essentially creating an accountability chain. If you want to describe a logical chain of accountability instead as a “accountability sink”, then I’d go along with that.

It’s true that accountability chains can be difficult to keep track of and the longer they get, the blurrier they get.

The comments here are grossly oversimplifying this concept.

The terms "shit umbrella" and "shit funnel" have been around for a long time, at least in the context of management in software development.

https://managementpatterns.blogspot.com/2013/01/pattern-shit...

I learned early on when I moved from development to management that a big part of my job was being accountable for everything my team did (short of outright sabotage). You don't hold junior devs accountable for anything, you do your best to monitor their work anytime they're working on something mission critical and to mentor them through the mistakes they make. Senior devs take on some or a lot of that monitoring and mentoring role, especially as the team size grows, but as their manager I am still accountable for any errors they make too (especially including letting errors from junior devs slip through).

Sometimes I think the most important part of my job is standing up before senior management and saying something like "My team made this series of decisions which resulted in the bad outcome we are here to discuss. I apologise and accept full responsibility. The team has learned from this, and we can assure you we will never repeat this mistake." And then deflecting and outright refusing to throw any of my team under the bus by naming them - to the point of being accused of insubordination occasionally.

(To be honest, I didn't internalise that quite early enough. There are probably a few apologies I should have made from back then...)

> You can still be on the hook for rolling a 100 sided die. And in some cases that's effectively all you can do.

Sure. And the article allows for that. You need to have "an account" that acknowledges that at the time you didn't and couldn't have enough information to completely de risk the decision, but that you'd discussed and agreed that the 1/100 (or 1/5 or 1/10,000) risk of the bad outcome was a known and acceptable risk.

"where an account is something that you tell. How did something happen, what were the conditions that led to it happening, what made the decision seem like a good one at the time? Who were all of the people involved in the decision or event?"

Sure you are a little bit responsible if your hiring manager hires a dud, but not as much. Similarly your hiring manager is not as responsible as the dud, accountability loses power in each chain.

You can fire your hiring manager and pick another one if he fails too often for example