(2003-08-19) Rothman Accountability

Johanna Rothman muses on the concept of Accountability. Accountability has nothing to do with blaming other people; it has everything to do with seeing the work and understanding how to move the work to the next state. The core goal seems to be maximizing the odds of positive project outcomes. The problem I see comes from assigning (accounting) all credit/blame for outcomes to a single person. To some extent this is a classic case of handling Complexity via abstration: as usual (or more than usual) there are big dangers of oversimplification. (A cynic might note that concentrating blame on a single point makes it easier to keep all blame off oneself.)

I think the key Risk Management lesson is to figure out how to identify needs for change in direction before it's too late. Once again, frequent iteration/FeedBack seems like an important strategy: Agility Vs Conflict.

But the meta-question remaining is: what is Accountability? It's a Game Rule - what's the game?