Ep. 139: Redefining Accountability

In this episode, Peter and Dave explore the complexities of accountability and leadership in organizations. They delve into how systems can often constrain agency and foster "learned helplessness," even when leaders claim to have an open-door policy. The conversation touches on the importance of empathetic listening, inclusive language, and creating environments that empower teams to make decisions closer to the issues they face.

This week´s takeaways: 

• Organizational systems are often designed to produce repetitive, constrained behavior, making it difficult for individuals to break out of engrained patterns, even when change is needed.
• True accountability requires not just assigning responsibility, but providing the authority, support and incentives for people to exercise that accountability.
• Leaders must be intentional about using inclusive language that creates psychological safety and invites open dialogue, rather than language that shuts down discourse.

Resources:

• The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davis- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/211161687-the-unaccountability-machine
• Leadership is Language: The Hidden Power of What You Say -- and What You Don't by David Marquet - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42774083-leadership-is-language?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_39

 We love to hear your feedback! If you have questions or would like to suggest a topic please contact us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com.

Chapters

• 0:04 Navigating Leadership and Accountability Challenges
• 10:50 Leadership Empathy and System Optimization

Transcript

Peter: 0:04

Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and David Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Hello Dave, how are you today?

Dave: 0:15

This is a dangerous time for us to be having this conversation, isn't it? A lot later than we normally connect.

Peter: 0:22

It is. I am definitely feeling a little bit more tired than I normally do, but I'm sure you're going to keep me awake with invigorating conversation.

Dave: 0:28

Something like that, something like that.

Peter: 0:30

Yeah.

Dave: 0:31

And I think, as we were kind of coming into this chat, I know both of us have been reading different books, different insights, but around sort of leadership and accountability and I think it would be really interesting to explore some of the ideas that we both have experienced and recognize and help organizations kind of address.

Peter: 0:54

Yes, yeah, and I think one of the interesting books the book I picked up recently was one called the Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davis, and not all the way through it, but I like some of the early ideas and concepts that he's talking about in there. Some of them I'm quite familiar with. He talks a lot about Stafford Beer and cybernetics and stuff, but one of the concepts he had in there early on was this idea of an accountability sink, something that we're all very familiar with in organizations. It's this idea that organizations put people without accountability or authority the ones that are at the edge and they're the ones that you end up interacting with. So, for example, you have a problem with your flight or your flight is canceled or delayed and you go and talk to the person at the desk. Person at the desk has no authority and no accountability and there's nothing that they can do about it. They're not the person you want to talk to.

Dave: 1:51

the person you want to talk to sitting in a office like somewhere else in another city, and my experience- they're at home because they're nowhere to be seen, but absolutely and that one is the it almost feels like that's the standard for customer service in many cases is to really be at arm's length from the authority figures who can actually do things, so that you end up in that sort of and I guess that's what you mean by the accountability sink. You're in a position where nobody around you is accountable. So how can you solve the problem?

Peter: 2:26

yeah, and in many cases.

Dave: 2:27

It's really not not going to happen, right?

Peter: 2:29

yeah, and in the book you described like.

Dave: 2:31

So the bad people start yelling at the person at the desk and the good people walk away fuming because they're thwarted and they can't get it done, but either way you know exactly, there's only a few pathways that they can and and this is there's only a few different options that they have available to them, and it's never sufficient for you or whoever else to actually get satisfaction, exactly so.

Peter: 2:55

So this got me thinking yet again about accountability in organizations, which is a lot of what this book is about, and while I was picking it up, and then when I'm looking at risk management and the way that risk management structures working organizations they have to set, we've got a set of controls and everybody has to do what the control says, regardless of whether doing what the control says is the right thing or whether it's potentially more dangerous to do what the control says.

Peter: 3:20

And so who is ultimately accountable to be able to make those decisions? Now, and in most risk management frameworks, we'll be quite clear about who is accountable, but I've also seen it where it's not necessarily as clear as it needs to be, and that the organizational culture is such that even if the person who nominally is accountable is said to be accountable, they don't have the authority to go with that and or they are overridden like it's the. You're not doing what I say. So I'm going to go to your boss, and this is something I'll get my VP to talk to your VP, and I mean all of this is friction in the decision making process.

Dave: 3:58

Yeah, and in many cases, that friction might be there for a good reason, like if I've got a budget cap and we don't want everybody in the organization incurring costs which are out of control then putting some form of friction into that buying process internally, internal controls, for that totally makes sense.

Dave: 4:14

I think what we were discussing, or what immediately springs to mind for me, is we talk so much about complexity, about dynamic environments requiring knowledge, workers requiring experience and thoughtful addressing of the issues that people might be dealing with. Developers, for example, if you think of security and how developers code and how what they learned through college and university is probably not relevant when it comes to security anymore. Things are changing all the time, so how do you stay on top of that? Not relevant when it comes to security anymore. Things are changing all the time, so how do you stay on top of that? Surgeons continuously learning the latest techniques and staying ahead of the curve, right. So if you're in a system where there's friction for some of these cognitive problems, then we have a real situation on our hands and I think that's part of that accountability and leadership and delegating. How do we get decisions being made deeper in an organization when they are kind of life or death or success or not for a product we're building?

Peter: 5:11

right. Right, I mean often they're. They're not going to be life or death in a lot of the circumstances that, especially in sort of most organizations and but the the pressures are very much the same. There's a lot of the same sort of emotional responses that come up are going to be very, very similar. Um, when you're put into these situations where there's conflicts of interest, it's like if I, if if I, and feel like I'm the person accountable, if I follow through on what I feel I'm accountable, is that going to affect my bonus? It's like that can I put? Can I keep the roof over my head and put food on the plate?

Dave: 5:46

yes, so I'm immediately identifying two kind of sides there. One is, um what are the consequences for me or for my team, or whatever it might be? And and are they? Clear is it obvious that I can actually control it, and so on.

Dave: 5:59

Uh, and then the second one is you talk about the system, but if the system has guided me and trained me to respond in a particular way in all of these contexts, what is how it? How am I going to break out of that learned? It's almost like learned helplessness. I'm going to follow the process, dot the i's and cross the t's as per but you know, as per instruction, but the one time that I shouldn't do it, how on earth am I going to break out of that cycle of repetition?

Peter: 6:25

Yeah, you talk about agentic behavior, like where you've given up all agency, essentially that you just do what you're told. And that comes about because a lot of times, if you've tried to not do what you're told, you've tried to do something different, you've brought up ideas, you've wanted to do things in a different way. It's been stomped all over. So I was having that conversation with an architect earlier today, actually around the very same thing introducing new technology into an organization and even modern things like Copilot and stuff like this AI assistance for writing code although now Microsoft's kind of rebanded everything as Copilot, so it's a little hard to tell which is which but in this case, to help you write code and there's a reluctance to even try it. Yeah, because it's not the set of behaviors that they've learned and been sort of had beaten into them at this point.

Dave: 7:25

Well and you used it. I think we talked about the example of if I have an open door policy and my door is always open and nobody comes through it.

Dave: 7:32

That tells us many things about the response that people expect when new ideas are raised or challenges or whatever it might be, and so and actually we're very good at avoiding that uncertainty of is this going to get taken well or not, and I think, if we just kind of circle back around to leadership, this is so much to do with the leadership. Everything that we've talked about is about how do you create agency in the teams around you in terms of making the right decisions at the right time under guidance and so on, and the critical piece there is how the leaders create that agency.

Peter: 8:08

Right and exactly, and it's always been like everybody has to raise everything up to the top, that kind of thing. It's like I'm not going to, I'm not allowed, I don't feel like I can make the decision myself. I've got to go and ask somebody else. I never have authority and so that can be evidence. So it's kind of like we could go through the list of things you start to see in organizations and you see this a lot. Some of the other pieces An interesting one is where you've got the constant changing of direction policy. There's no consistent strategy. Everybody's got a different idea about which way to go. There's no alignment and to get things done. When you go reach out to others to help you, they're like, nope, can't do that, and you're left in a sort of a bubble of getting tasked with things that you can't even do because others that you need to help you aren't available to help you and it becomes a horrible, horrible mess.

Dave: 8:59

So the book that I I've been kind of skimming through and beginning to take a lot from is uh, david marquette's, leadership is language and and this has been whenever I've introduced things like leadership agility and bill joiner's work on leadership agility- and I really like that model for leadership growth development. One of the things that we've always focused on, or I've always kind of drawn attention to, is that language. You can often tell a lot about a leader by the language they're using, inclusive language.

Dave: 9:29

you know first person whatever it might be, and the leadership is language book really goes in a little bit deeper into that to talk about how even the theoretically helpful, open minded responses that we as leaders may have with the people that we are working with aren't always as open minded and providing agency as you might think. So if I just throw a quick example of if we're trying to do a product rollout and maybe things are not going as well as they could and somebody phoned up and contacts on Teams or whatever the communication channel might be, and the response from a leader is is there anything you need Is there anything going wrong or are we on track?

Dave: 10:10

Is there any problem that we need to worry about? That's actually not very conducive to a response, because it's really difficult to admit that the job I'm paid for is not going where it would like to go, or there's a problem and I'm going to need my boss my boss's boss to come down. So the example they use is on a scale of one to five. How valuable would it be if I came down and helped out or got involved?

Dave: 10:32

And now it allows information to to come out, and I think that's so. That's really got me thinking. It's really making my head scratch a bit about that leadership communication which is so important yes, yeah, it it is.

Peter: 10:45

And uh, it's interesting, they turn it into a scaling question as a way of responding to that. Um, there's, I think there's a listening piece to that too. I mean, how well do leaders listen? Leaders listen so that they are actually hearing what's being said. I had a conversation earlier in the week where there was interspersed uses of things like well, I'm feeling frustrated and the whole organization feels dysfunctional. This was interspersed over a long conversation, but it was just pulling out those bits around. Okay, so what's frustrating you? What's, and then what? What's the dysfunction that you're seeing? What's the evidence of that dysfunction that you're seeing in the organization? What does that look like? How's that making you feel? What does that? And so, because it's listening for those pieces and pulling them out can help people start to feel sort of that they're heard.

Dave: 11:38

Well, that's the empathy side, and what strikes me in so much of this is we all talk about the importance of leadership and we talk about empathy. We talk about creating safe spaces. We talk about the language, we talk about all of these things. Creating sales spaces we talk about the language, we talk about all of these things. However, in the bulk of the organizations that we work in or we see or we know about, I'm not sure that it has the same level of attention.

Peter: 12:06

Yeah, I think that's, unfortunately, more than fair. I think there's one of the common patterns I see is that it's the IC who's being brought up through leadership I think we've talked about this and they've never really been given the leadership support and training that they need, and you do often see those people only reach a certain level. But there's that need to have that empathy as a leader, to learn how to be a good leader. Now I've also, though, unfortunately, seen leaders who have basically no empathy whatsoever and just get through their days by yelling at people very loudly, and those ones I wonder how exactly did you get into the position you're in?

Dave: 12:47

Well, and I think we need to be careful here, because it's a little easy just to say yes, leaders suck, they need to buck up, and so on. I think, coming back to systems, the reality is and this is, the systems reinforce that behavior yes, overloading in terms of expectations and work and not providing the resources for the expectations that are going on. There's lots of things within the system which are going to ramp up the pressure, that make things very difficult to cooperate with. So so then the question becomes why aren't organizations changing those systems? And I'm guessing it's because the value of isn't obvious, of the sort of enlightened leaders we talk about. I think we're touching on that steve denning paper that we discussed a few few podcasts ago yeah, I think it.

Peter: 13:34

Uh, it is in there um, where there's the system, will do what the system's going to do, regardless of the individual um models of the people within it. So now you can modify the system's behavior, but it doesn't necessarily rely on the behavior of the people in it to do that. It's the behavior of the system as it to do that. It's the behavior of the system as a whole. Although, if you look at the system and the system's going to continue to if I've got a system that prints out money and it's got a whole bunch of people in who are involved in that and they're following through on the different pieces, they do no matter how they behave. It's still going to continue to do the things that it's doing. The bank's still going to take my money and give me back my money, and all of those things are still going to occur, regardless of the behaviors a lot of the individuals within it. All of those pieces will continue to happen. So there's a larger scale. The system itself will continue to behave as that system.

Dave: 14:28

But the system's operating because it's optimizing for whatever. If we stop talking about general theoretical systems, if I'm running my company in a hierarchical way, without reinforcing languages that we were talking about or systems and the inability to get accountability or out where we'd like to because of the system that we're working in, that system is optimized to succeed in the market and it means we either don't know where the benefit would be if that organization redesigned its systems to be better at everything that we've been talking about. There has to be a benefit in the market. They have to be able to be much more effective for the same number of employees in terms of delivering product to the market or serving their customers at a higher level, get more profit, whatever it might be, and I do. I mean that's where I wonder if we really understand what the benefit of systems that work really well with accountability and delegation of authority and things like that, that create environments where the leaders really do empower and give agency to the people that they're working with.

Dave: 15:35

They should outperform in the market.

Peter: 15:39

Agreed, and so when we look at so, where do we see organizations like that?

Dave: 15:46

Well, there is. So the examples I always think of are the things like the, say airline crews is the class of one surgery surgery surgeons, and so on. There are a number of different it's often vocations or career kind of areas where they have to be responsive, immensely responsive, and therefore they build the systems that allow them to to scenario role play continually, scenario planning and things like this, so that they have the sort of mental muscle.

Dave: 16:15

Now the other ones which are quite interesting are things like university, where it's slightly different, but they value the diversity and the sort of challenging conversation and discourse around what is working in one lab and is not working in another and things like this. So there are certain domains that operate like that, but I don't think it really operates that way in, say, financial services, retail and things like that. It's definitely not the same.

Peter: 16:40

No, no, it's a. It definitely works differently in those systems where it's very much more hierarchical and it's much more. We need this system to behave exactly the same way every single time. So we're going to put very strict rules into place around how people behave and we're going to remove a lot of that agency and the accountability throughout the structure, and so a lot of organizations then start to behave in that manner because they're successful. But you raised the interesting question do you become more successful if you start to set up environments which don't have that? And if we look at examples, which is more the holocratic type environments. But if you look at an organization like Zappos or something like that, that's probably one of the most famous ones. Once they reached a certain size, they had to put hierarchy in, because it was incredibly difficult to actually operate, otherwise it couldn't consistently deliver.

Dave: 17:35

Yeah it's a tremendous overhead with all the contract negotiations, kind of like the internal handshake agreements on how those network systems work, we could carry on. Like I said, how are we going to summarize some of the key takeaways?

Peter: 17:50

I dare you to try, dare me to try, dare me to try. Okay, you're giving me accountability for this whole point.

Dave: 17:57

Oh, you've taken it Great, there you go On a scale of one to five. How useful do you think this conversation could be?

Peter: 18:06

I think there's some interesting pieces to pull out of that.

Peter: 18:08

If nothing else, there's some interesting books for people to go and read and we can put those in the show notes.

Peter: 18:13

Um, the I think the nature of, like the importance of accountability, um is one where we we think we've said that people are accountable and we haven't necessarily given them the things they need to be accountable in those organizations.

Peter: 18:46

I don't think we acknowledge enough that the system in the organization way for 10 years and then we're expecting them to behave differently on the next day and suddenly react and do something in an abnormal way which would appear to be the right way to do it right. It's something that's better. Don't expect them that they're going to because they've done it that way for the last 10 years. They're not going to just change overnight and you're going to need to work out how you're going to support people through that. So I think that's an interesting piece of it, like understanding those parts of it, understanding that they are complex systems and that where accountability lies, and whether when you've said that somebody is accountable accountability, you've actually allowed them to be accountable for something or you've just said it in name only so that definitely that conversation around the impact of systems and recognizing that we create, a system that is intended to create repetitive, constrained behavior in some way.

Dave: 19:44

We can't also expect, expect that sudden ability to change track given a particular context coming right. So I think that, and that leads us to really we talked a little bit about what are the drivers for changing that system. If we recognize that the reason you know organizations work the way they do is the system that they're optimizing. You know, within the market, that they're optimizing for the results that they're getting, and that suggests there's a gap somehow, or a lack of understanding about those ideal systems that we want to see in terms of leadership and what's actually being done.

Peter: 20:17

And I don't think we answered that question.

Dave: 20:18

I just think we kind of raised it. I know we talked a bit about Steve Denning's work on that one. He had a really interesting paper a few podcasts ago, but there's something there yeah, I think.

Peter: 20:28

Uh, I think that kind of sums it up for today. I think there's a and a conversation around the. What are the ways in which you start to look at modification system? How do you know you're in the right place for the system, for the environment that you're in and that you're? The behaviors are actually benefiting you, and so you can start to look for the ones which are not and see where those are in your organization.

Dave: 20:51

And I'm going to put that final plug in about language. Leadership. Is language as well in there. I think there's something very interesting about where we go as leaders as well.

Peter: 21:00

Awesome, a little bit of a rambling conversation. A lot harder.

Dave: 21:03

Yeah, a lot harder. Yes, it was a rambling conversation.

Peter: 21:06

Yes, I would like to thank all our listeners and don't forget to hit subscribe For their patience. Patience for the patience. I think we finally got somewhere in all that we did yeah, until next time. Yeah, until next time. And feedback at definitelymaybeagilecom. Thanks Bye. You've been listening to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where your hosts, Peter Maddison and David Sharrock, focus on the art and science of digital agile and DevOps at scale.