There is something about the word accountabiity that smacks (pun intended) of judgement and punishment, even if unintended. Some – many – will take it that way.
And yet, no person is ever in control of reality:
nobody is ever fully responsible for the outcomes of thing they do. They work with volatile, unpredictable circumstances. They cannot possibly know what the future will bring. It is impossible to know the causality of reality: they cannot model it to predict what will happen. And the information they work with is always imperfect, unclear, ambiguous. We can invest heavily to constrain reality into a well-behaved, simple, clear, predicable machine, only to have it collapse into chaos due to no single or evident cause.
So how can anyone be held to account for what happened when somebody did something? They tried, it didn’t work, great. Now we can learn from that and try again. Nobody is responsible for the outcome of anything. We are all riding the tiger of reality.
There are much better concepts than accountability to assess somebody’s performance or to expect their next steps: curiosity, resilience, adaptability, collaboration, professionalism, wisdom. Let’s get over this red/orange:Alpha:Theory-X thinking of accountability and mature to green/teal:Beta:Theory-Y culture. What happens is a collective concern not an individual one.
