You can’t hold anyone accountable for a decision they never had the clear right to make. Fix the decision architecture and the accountability you’ve been chasing arrives on its own.
Something has gone wrong for the third time this year, the same way each time, and you have arrived at the explanation. It’s an accountability problem. People aren’t owning outcomes. Things fall between the cracks and nobody answers for it. So you do the accountability things. You raise it in the all-hands. You add an owner to the tracker. You give the talk about extreme ownership. For a few weeks it’s better. Then it quietly isn’t, and you settle on the verdict: you have a culture of people who won’t step up.
You almost certainly don’t. What you have, underneath the thing you’re calling an accountability problem, is a decision-rights problem. And you can run accountability drives until you retire without fixing it, because you’re treating a symptom in a place the disease doesn’t live.
Here is the claim, stated plainly, because the whole piece hangs on it: you cannot hold a person accountable for a decision they never had the clear right to make.Accountability is not a character trait you exhort people into. It is a structural consequence of decision rights being clearly assigned. Where the right to decide is clear, accountability follows almost automatically. Where it’s unclear, split, or quietly overridden, no amount of exhortation produces it, because there is no clean line from the outcome back to a person who actually owned the call.
What accountability actually requires
Strip accountability down to its mechanism and it needs three things to exist, in sequence. A person has to have had the authority to make a decision. They have to have made it. And the outcome has to be traceable back to that decision. Break any of the three and accountability is not weak — it’s structurally impossible, and everyone in the system knows it even when they can’t articulate it.
