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This is the Too Many Trees newsletter, where I share what I’ve been writing and reading in the realm of leadership and personal development. My executive coaching practice is centered around the idea that we are more effective in moving towards our goals when we become more conscious and intentional in focusing our time and attention, and learn how our unconscious patterns are holding us back. If you know somebody that could benefit from my perspective, please forward this to them or let them know they can set up a free intro chat with me.
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Unaccountability and Conversations
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How did we create a system where accountability is so diffused that there’s nobody to blame when things go wrong?
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Dan Davies answers that question in his new book, The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - and How The World Lost its Mind, by using a framework called management cybernetics that applied systems theory to management. The main idea is that "The purpose of a system is what it does”, abbreviated as POSIWID, where we pay attention to the impact of a system, not the intention of the humans involved. POSIWID is essential because any changes we make will be ineffective unless we are starting from the current system reality.
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Davies uses these ideas to document the rise of “accountability sinks”, which are mechanisms by which “The communication between the decision-maker and the decided-upon has been broken – they have created a handy sink into which negative feedback can be poured without any danger of it affecting anything.” While these mechanisms were initially designed to simplify management by creating a protocol to handle normal situations, it means they are also unable to adapt to new circumstances, leaving the people implementing them in a bind where they can’t do anything differently even they know it doesn’t make sense.
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The book also details how this “what else can I do?” bind has propagated to the C-suite thanks to the rise of shareholder maximization - company leaders now exclusively focus on share price, and trust that “the market” will integrate all available information into that single number for them to optimize.
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But the problem is that “the market” then becomes the ultimate accountability sink. The managers don’t have to take responsibility for their decisions, because it’s what “the market” wanted. Investors in the stock don’t have to take responsibility, because it’s the managers making decisions about the company. There is nobody left to be responsible, and that’s how we end up in our current situation where companies act as amoral unresponsive unaccountable entities, because the people inside those companies have given up responsibility to these processes.
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Writing that review reminded me of Fernando Flores's book, Conversations for Action and Collected Essays, which I had read a couple years ago and never summarized. Flores was a collaborator of Stafford Beer, who Davies identified as the originator of "management cybernetics". Flores also apparently collaborated with James Flaherty, who trained me at his coaching institute, New Ventures West.
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Flores outlines an elegant structure for conversations that drive action, with a step to explicitly negotiate expectations for future action, and hold people accountable, with a step for the recipient of work to decide if it meets their expectations before approving it. Note that such conversations are the antithesis of the accountability sinks that Davies describes.
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My favorite quote is the following reminder that conversations are not different from action; they create action through identifying new possible realities.
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Conversation is not merely a prelude to action, it is its very essence. … People don’t merely use language to communicate their desires about the future; they create the future in language together by making commitments to each other.
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And now for the normal personal development content…
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LinkedIn: These are ideas that have helped my clients (or myself), and that I share via LinkedIn to help a wider audience, and archive here.
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- Let go of your current work and train your successor. If you hold on tightly to your current work, you will get stuck at your current level. Instead, give your work away to create the space for you to take on bigger jobs with more scope.
- How will you use this? When somebody asks you to create something for them, I suggest asking "How will you use this?" before starting work. You may discover that you can skip the work they are asking of you because you already have a solution that will address their problem, and/or build something quicker that helps solve their pain point in a way they didn't even know was possible.
- What would your ideal day at work look like? Visualize what a really great work day would be like, including what you want more of and less of each day. If you want to improve how you feel at work, close the gaps between what you currently do and your ideal day.
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A few articles related to accountability that caught my attention recently:
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- Nadia Asparouhova's article on Dangerous Protocols. This is a long read, but ties in well with The Unaccountability Machine as she notes that "A historical look at protocols suggests that their purpose has always been to simplify coordination and communication. With enough time, protocols converge upon conformity. They do not liberate us, but rather seek to control us completely." With that conformity and control comes a lack of accountability and an inability to adapt to changing realities; in Davies's terms, the protocol has become an accountability sink.
- Tara Seshan's 10 things about being an actually useful "generalist". Reading it made me feel old, as this is somebody whose first "real" job was at Stripe, ten years after I had already identified myself as an Unrepentant Generalist. But I appreciate anybody writing about the value of generalists, while holding aspiring generalists accountable to actually creating value, rather than just wanting to lead without having developed rare and valuable skills.
- The best founders don’t care if an investor is “founder friendly” by Harry Glaser. He points out that founders that optimize for investors who are "founder friendly" are playing a short-term game. If you want to change the world, you need partners who will hold you accountable to higher standards: "We are going into business together for the long term, and I expect you to make sure you get what you need to make this work for you over a long period of time."
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Thanks for reading! See you in a couple weeks!
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I realized on Saturday that I had no photos for the newsletter, so I had to go on a hike to get a nature picture. The life of a content creator!
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