The Accountability Dodge
Shared accountability is diluted accountability. Always.
Fortune abandons the leader who doubts a capable person mid-task. Valluvar’s warning connects doubt to dissolution. But what happens when there’s nobody to doubt because nobody owns the task? “We all own it.” You’ve heard this. You’ve probably said it. It sounds collaborative. It sounds empowering. It sounds like shared purpose. It’s none of those things. It’s a sentence that means: when this fails, nobody’s name is on it. Shared accountability is diluted accountability. Always.
After the Texas City refinery explosion killed 15 workers in 2005, BP used the phrase ‘systemic failure’ 47 times in its internal investigation. I counted. ‘Systemic failure’ means the system failed. Not a person. Not a decision. Not a cost-cutting directive from London that reduced maintenance budgets for three consecutive years. When nobody is accountable, the accountability dodge is complete. The 15 workers who died at Texas City were victims not of an explosion but of a vocabulary designed to distribute blame so thinly that it disappears.
Accountability dissolves when distributed. In chemistry, diffusion is the process by which concentrated molecules spread evenly through a solution until the concentration is uniform. Drop ink in water. It disperses. The ink still exists, but it’s so diluted that it’s functionally invisible. Organizational accountability diffuses identically. When ownership is assigned to “everyone,” it disperses until it’s functionally zero. Everyone is responsible. Nobody feels responsible. The accountability still exists in theory. In practice, it’s ink in water.
Name one owner for one outcome today. Not a team. Not a committee. Not a working group. One name. One outcome. One person who will answer for it. If that feels uncomfortable, you’ve found the dodge. Accountability isn’t shared. It’s named.
That disappearing act has a name. The Accountability Dodge. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Untie The Knot
Uproot
Accountability diffused because collective ownership felt collaborative. Assigning one name felt accusatory. The organisation confused shared responsibility with shared accountability. Over time, ‘we all own it’ became ‘nobody owns it,’ and nobody noticed the transition.
Navigate
Every outcome has one named owner. Not a team. Not a committee. One person who answers for the result. Shared input, singular accountability.
Tool
DMG / Decision Ownership: the protocol that assigns every decision and outcome a single named accountable party. DMG prevents diffusion by making accountability explicit and non-shareable.
Implement
Name one owner for one outcome today. Not a team. One name. If that feels uncomfortable, you’ve located the dodge. Accountability isn’t collaborative. It’s personal.
Emerge
When accountability has a name, decisions happen faster, post-mortems produce change instead of reports, and the team stops waiting for ‘someone’ to act.