Accountability Sinks

Structures (rules, departments, "policy," technical limitations turned into process) that allow organizations to produce bad outcomes while ensuring that no individual can be held responsible or can effectively intervene.

Classic symptoms:

• Front-line humans can only "follow the process" and have no authority to override.
• When challenged, the organization speaks as an amorphous entity; the human you are talking to is not empowered.
• After the fact, statements like "formally correct but assessment mistake" or "sincere regret" appear, but no one was in a position to stop it.
• Safeguards are assumed to come from individual heroism on rare occasions — which is unrealistic.

Examples: shredded squirrels at Schiphol, airline gate agents, credit card name-length rejections.

Useful lens for understanding why organizations behave in frustrating or unethical ways and for finding places where real accountability (or redesign of the sink) can be introduced.

Sources

• accountability-sinks-martin-sustrik
• a-reading-list-for-generalists-dylan-bowman (Interpersonal/organizational)