Accountability is a difficult thing to define let alone practice. This is particularly so in complex systems and therefore in public service, where arguably the need for good accountability is greatest. It is difficult to hold someone accountable for an outcome they couldn’t control. Yet, the outcomes in public services that we care most about are those that no single person or institution or agency could wholly own or control.
It is difficult to hold someone accountable for not doing the thing that we didn’t know needed to be done at the point we made them accountable. Yet, wicked problems arise in complex systems where not only are problems hard to analyse, they also keep changing.
In spite of this, the common response to persistent wicked problems is to introduce yet more standards of compliance. But this approach only rewards avoiding the bad decisions of past problems rather than thinking about how to make good decisions in an ever-evolving present.
In September 2023 a group of leaders and organisational practitioners in the public sector came together to discuss how we would know when accountability is at its best. What difference does it make if it is? And, what practices and structures can scaffold best accountability in complexity?
Here, I summarise the themes of that conversation and provide some supporting theories from the behavioural sciences in order to offer a practical response that people can make to improve accountability culture in their organisational setting.
At its best accountability is a relationship, not a task
The best versions of accountability were described as a two-way or circular process. Accountability is not something provided by or required by one party but a feature of the interaction between invested parties. The quality of this interaction needs to be based on trust that the purpose of the interaction is to inform the future of a common cause. Best accountability was described as arising from regular communication to support learning and advancement of a common cause.
These descriptions were contrasted with a poor experience of accountability being a transactional task performed uni-directionally through a hierarchy. These are experienced as threatening by those receiving the accountability action.
“So, I think it’s easy to reduce it to a task. But what I’ve heard in the definition that’s being offered goes beyond the task element. There’s something about the meaning, and the part that you play, and what’s at stake.”
Felt accountability:
In contrast to the management task of accountability, the psychological concept of Felt Accountability describes the expectation that an individual’s decisions and behaviours will be evaluated by an “able” accountability forum with authority[1]. Felt accountability is important because a large body of experimental studies show that whether or not you expect to be made to justify your actions later, to whom and on what criteria affects the quality of your decision making. Sometimes for the better, but somewhat problematically for our organisational reporting culture, also sometimes for the worse.
While organograms, protocols and terms of reference and the like are organisational mechanisms, felt accountability refers to the individual human response to the accountability environment in which that individual operates. And the reality of that environment, especially in complex systems, is a dynamic web of human relationships and expectations. In a single decision, leaders may be thinking of rules governing the operational hierarchy and expectations of their regulator, but they may also be thinking of how they will explain their actions to their colleagues, employees, service users, stakeholders and even family and friends. What matters during the decision making process is how salient to the decision maker these different account holders are — the relationships.
At its best accountability is about what matters, not control
“a means of helping people who don’t know one another to collaborate to do things together.”
Accountability is something to fall back on as we navigate working together. At its best, we are disciplined to be clear about our common purpose and the responsibilities and roles each party have agreed to. Accountability should also help partners navigate uncertainty and provide a mature response to risk.
The artefacts that describe and enable accountability in different settings should, therefore, be unique and context specific. This then raised the question, do common or standard accountability actions — best practice even — simply perpetuate an illusion of control over something uncontrollable?
To identify accountability at its best we need to distinguish it from organisational control. This distinction seems to be in parallel to those of standardisation versus personalisation, and of machination versus humanisation. Equating accountability with control is an organisational design sleight of hand with sometimes terrible consequences. There are too many examples now of terrible failures that were masked by performance management compliance in the health and care alone (e.g. Mid-Staffordshire, Morecambe Bay, Winterbourne View, Shrewsbury and Telford).
Why mattering matters:
As an alternative to compliance and control, I’d like to suggest that best accountability is really about meaning and mattering. In life we have to feel that we have meaning to thrive. And at work — even in the most mundane jobs — we still need to feel that we make a difference by being there; that our actions matter. Mattering is so important to healthy workplaces that Gabriella Rosenberg and Martin Seligman have recently made it one of their five psychological powers of workplace thriving (alongside resilience (or cognitive agility), rapid rapport to build social support, prospection and creativity)[2].
If no-one holds me or anyone else to account beyond compliance to organisational process control, then we have a significant crisis of mattering. Those who know that their work is meaningful are more likely to contribute discretionary effort[3] which as explained in the next section is also a feature of best accountability.
At its best, accountability is achieved at people’s discretion, not through a water-tight contract
Experiences of accountability at its best were all within the context of discretionary effort in the work-place. For example, an improvement project contributed to on a voluntary basis. In these contexts, people experienced delegated authority to make decisions and had to take time to agree explicitly how they would work together.
Another example given was a clinician going out of their way to make sure a care plan was enacted.
“basically he took over a lot of the care in terms of getting me the right combination of drugs. That worked. Now where exactly was accountability for solving my medical problem? I’m not sure, but I think my GP had some of it and he took that accountability and worked with other people to deliver an outcome”
In the ‘best’ examples it seems that people are making themselves accountable, rather than being held to account by another. People who make themselves accountable are never ‘hitting the target but missing the point’. Again, the felt-accountability model is helpful here because it is the response (to the salient account holders in their environment) that stimulates and enables individuals to take responsibility for wicked problems, not a line on a flow-chart or an action checklist.
Where best-accountability was least experienced was, paradoxically, in contracted work. Participants discussed that where contracts can be specific, contractual accountability works well. Problems arise when contracts are specific about the ‘wrong’ things, or vague about what needs to be done.
“So we’re not actually accountable for doing the right thing. We just have to do that thing.”
“you can’t specify all these things in minutiae. Or, even in legal and contractual terms, if you’re after some degree of flexibility. Even in a manufacturing setting where we might imagine that you could specify these things down to the nth degree.”
At its best, accountability has restorative consciousness and is concerned with reconciliation
“in the private sector proper, you’ve got the most disciplining possible accountability framework which is going bust.”
Participants reflected on their work across public and private sectors that while the public sector talks more about accountability there seems to be less of it. People felt in the private sector it is easier to point out problems and for them to be addressed, whereas in the public sector a lot of time is spent reporting good news in compliance exercises.
On the one hand, the public sector needs to be forgiving because we want it to carry on. Public services need to get better, not go bust. Disciplining a public service by destroying it does not help us in the long run. Years of financial sanctions based on performance management have proved this.
Perhaps because we know that in the end the public sector will need to be forgiven, we are too quick to move past the point where wrongs are acknowledged and amends are made. Viewing accountability with a restorative consciousness moves us away from apportioning blame or issuing sanctions and towards valuing the process of reconciliation. If best accountability is about protecting what matters in the relationships between us and our account holders then best accountability also involves openly acknowledging challenges, difficulties and even harms and taking action that contributes to a future where those involved are reconciled.
Moving towards best accountability
Based on the findings above, three immediate, simple and accessible actions emerge. These actions are certainly not offered as an alternative or replacement to mechanisms for organisational control. Control mechanisms will probably always have some role in organisational life and in many instances do good. These three actions simply offer the first steps of small, incremental changes in the behaviour of leaders and decision makers operating in complex environments that over time contribute to a culture of best accountability. Looking at these actions it feels apt to borrow a phrase of writer Cynthia Bourgeault’s that ‘although they are not hard to do, they are hard to value’. Developing the awareness, courage and resilience to stick to these actions every day is perhaps where leadership and accountability interact.
Accountability at its best is:
- a relationship not a task
- about what matters, not control
- is achieved at people’s discretion, not through a water-tight contract
- is concerned with reconciliation
Three actions for a culture shift towards best accountability
- Focus on how we make ourselves accountable for what matters to the community we are serving over the structures and processes that control and standardise certain actions of others.
- Understand accountability as a relationship between decision makers and a diverse web of account holders. Come to it with a ‘restorative consciousness’ where our priority is the ongoing relationship.
- Curate your ‘web’ of account holders to increase the salience of those voices that are most relevant to what matters not to those who can leverage the most control or issue the harshest sanctions.
[1] Lerner, J. S., & Tetlock, P. E. (1999). Accounting for the effects of accountability. Psychological bulletin, 125(2), 255.
[2] Kellerman, G. R., & Seligman, M. E. (2023). Tomorrowmind: Thriving at Work with Resilience, Creativity, and Connection — Now and in an Uncertain Future. Simon and Schuster.
[3] Ibid.