How did we create a system where accountability is so diffused that there’s nobody to blame when things go wrong?
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.
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 though they know it doesn’t make sense.
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.
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.
I appreciated this book for giving me new frameworks and ideas with which to make sense of the world, and will be thinking about how to apply them to change the system.
If you want to learn more, I wrote a longer summary with more details on the ideas at