On Responsibility

You may know that I am fairly active on Mastodon (my profile is here), and one of the things I like a lot are polls. I use them largely to get an outside view on my own thoughts.

Recently, I posted one such poll. It talked about a hypothetical scenario, and the question read:

A screw-up happened. The screw-up is ultimately due to a crucial piece of information not being relayed to the right person. Multiple levels of seniority were in the loop, all of whom could have caught the omission, but nobody did. Who bears responsibility for the screw-up?

The options were:

A — Everyone, jointly.

B — The most senior person¹ involved.

C — The person who would have normally been “most likely” to catch the omission.

D — Someone else. (You pledge to add a comment who that would be)

The poll ran for 24 hours, 276 people replied, and these were the results:

• A solid majority of 63% chose the “everyone, jointly” option (A).
• 28% selected the most senior person involved (B).
• 3% and 5%, respectively, selected options C and D.
• Some of the “D” options were sarcastic to outright cynical, amounting to, more or less, “the most convenient scapegoat” (note that the cynicism in that answer doesn’t make it wrong, though).

Now, I have a question for the 63% supermajority: have you any idea what “responsibility” means?

Have you been brainwashed by your corporate overlords that “bearing responsibility” is the same as “sharing the blame”? Or, worse, have you been tricked into the insanity that “responsibility” and “accountability” are two different things, rather than two terms for one inseparable concept? Because those are the only two ways I can think of in which dispersing it to everyone makes any sense.

Bearing responsibility is not something that starts when shit hits the proverbial fan.

Saying “I am responsible for something” in a professional context means: I’m taking it upon me that it works, and if it stops working I’m taking it upon me that it works again. Whatever that is: it can be a tiny piece of machinery, or a big, complex process involving the coordination of dozens or even hundreds of people.

And that rolls up with seniority. The higher up you are in the decision chain of a project, a department, or even a whole organization, the more responsibility you have. And making sure that the right people have the right information at the right time is a core responsibility of leadership. So if you’re in any leadership position, that is something you need to make sure works, and if it stops working, you need to fix it.

So in my not-so-humble opinion there is only one sensible answer to that question, and it’s B, and if we’re expecting otherwise, that means we are letting managers who don’t fullfill their responsibilities off the hook.

Bjoern Michaelsen had this to say in a reply:

I was tempted by A, but took B because the “jointly” suggests the responsibility is shared and reduced by the sharing. But responsibility is not a zero sum game: even if someone below you in the hierarchy is responsible, it does not reduce your own.

Higher ups need to hire the people to ensure fuckups don’t happen and design the workflows and processes that work for the people they hired.

TL;DR: responsibility can be shared, but never divided.

And that sums it up pretty nicely.