Accountability sinks via A Working Library [Shared]

I have seen this lack of accountability in real life many times. It allows any one employee to disavow responsibility for any action. “It is corporate policy. I can’t connect you with anyone else who can help you.” Even worse is the individual who performs heinous acts that they would decry being done to them because “It’s not me who is causing the issues. It is the amorphous ‘company’ that is doing it.” Corporations weaponize this inability to empathize in their workforce and “plausible deniability” to treat their customers with contempt. – Douglas

Accountability sinks via A Working Library

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In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held directly accountable for it. Here’s an example: a higher up at a hospitality company decides to reduce the size of its cleaning staff, because it improves the numbers on a balance sheet somewhere. Later, you are trying to check into a room, but it’s not ready and the clerk can’t tell you when it will be; they can offer a voucher, but what you need is a room. There’s no one to call to complain, no way to communicate back to that distant leader that they’ve scotched your plans. The accountability is swallowed up into a void, lost forever.

Davies proposes that:

For an accountability sink to function, it has to break a link; it has to prevent the feedback of the person affected by the decision from affecting the operation of the system.

Read this entire article – Accountability Sinks via A Working Library