Accountability sinks

I liked this article a lot - it made me think about the ways large companies operate from a different viewpoint.

At the same time, though, I think it's a mistake to leave out the fact that, in many ways, modern society is just so fundamentally complex that we (as a society at large) deliberately forego demanding accountability because we believe the system is so complex that it's impossible to assign blame to a single person.

For example, given this is HN and many of us are software developers, how many times have we collectively supported "blameless cultures" when it comes to identifying and fixing software defects. We do this because we believe that software is so complex, and "to err is human", that it would be a disservice to assign blame to an individual - we say instead that the process should assume mistakes are inevitable, and then improve the process to find those mistakes earlier in the software lifecycle.

But while I believe a "blameless culture" is valuable, I think a lot of times you can identify who was at fault. I mean, somebody at CrowdStrike decided to push a data update, without verifying it first, that bluescreened a good portion of the world's Windows machines and caused billions in damages.

I just think that if you believe "accountability sinks" are always a bad thing, don't forget the flip side: would things always be better if we could always assign "root cause blame" to a specific individual?

I think you are conflating accountability and blame when I don't think those terms can be used interchangeably here. Accountability can be used as a way of assigning blame, but that isn't all that it is good for.

Accountability, at least as presented here, is about feeeback between those affected by a decision and those making it. In a "blameless culture", people are still held to account for their decisions and actions but are not blamed for their results.

I would argue that a blameless culture actually makes accountability sinks less likely to develop. In blameful cultures, avoiding accountability avoids blame, but that is not needed in a blameless culture.

Thanks, I found your response really helpful, and it helped identify some of the mistakes in my thinking. "In blameful cultures, avoiding accountability avoids blame, but that is not needed in a blameless culture." - that really made a lot of sense to me.

That wasn't a thought I had articulated before I read your comment, so your comment was also very productive for me.

A blameless postmortem culture says that when a human error is identified in the causal chain leading to an incident, there will be no consequences for the individual. In a sense it embraces blame but eschews accountability.

> In a sense it embraces blame but eschews accountability.

The two concepts we are talking about are each talked about under each label so there is enough ambiguity in both words that this is true. However choosing to use 'blame' in the opposite sense from the one being used in that context adds nothing to the conversation.