Accountabilism

Thanks for Johnnie for flagging David Weinberger’s HBR piece on the downward-spiralling horrors of accountability.

“Accountability has gone horribly wrong. It has become “accountabalism,” the practice of eating sacrificial victims in an attempt to magically ward off evil.

The emphasis on accountability was an understandable response to some god-awful bookkeeping-based scandals. But the notion would never have evolved from a buzzword into the focus of voluminous legislation if we hadn’t also been lured by the myth of precision: Because accountability suggests that there is a right and a wrong answer to every question, it flourishes where we can measure results exactly. It spread to schools—where it is eating our young—as a result of our recent irrational exuberance about testing, which forces education to become something that can be measured precisely.

When such disincentives as the threat of having to wear an orange jumpsuit for eight to ten years didn’t stop the Enron nightmare and other bad things from happening, accountabalism whispered two seductive lies to us: Systems go wrong because of individuals; and the right set of controls will enable us to prevent individuals from creating disasters. Accountabalism is a type of superstitious thinking that allows us to live in a state of denial about just how little control we individuals have over our environment.”

I agree.  What David is describing is wrong-headed accountability as a system of control and atomisation.  However, he totally misses the role accountability as a system of mutual influence - which is both its real (and realistic) purpose.

Accountability is about ‘Civilising Power‘ in Simon Zadek’s language.  A social function not an audit function.  Actually effective accountability is an upward spiral - ultimately solving problems at a higher level of generality.  Chris Macrae’s incomprehensible systems maps are a perfect example of real Accountability at the systems level…