{"id":4292,"date":"2024-05-12T13:59:35","date_gmt":"2024-05-12T13:59:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/uncategorized\/how-did-we-create-a-system-where-accountability-is-so-diffused-that-theres-nobody-to-blame-when-things-go-wrong\/"},"modified":"2026-03-12T21:29:42","modified_gmt":"2026-03-12T21:29:42","slug":"how-did-we-create-a-system-where-accountability-is-so-diffused-that-theres-nobody-to-blame-when-things-go-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/uncategorized\/how-did-we-create-a-system-where-accountability-is-so-diffused-that-theres-nobody-to-blame-when-things-go-wrong\/","title":{"rendered":"How did we create a system where accountability is so diffused that there’s nobody to blame when things go wrong?<\/a>"},"content":{"rendered":"

How did we create a system where accountability is so diffused that there’s nobody to blame when things go wrong?<\/p>\n

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\u201d, abbreviated as POSIWID, where we pay attention to\u00a0the impact of a system, not the intention\u00a0of the humans involved. POSIWID is essential because any changes we make will be ineffective unless we are starting from the current system reality.<\/p>\n

Davies uses these ideas to document the rise of \u201caccountability sinks\u201d, which are mechanisms by which \u201cThe communication between the decision-maker and the decided-upon has been broken \u2013 they have created a handy sink into which negative feedback can be poured without any danger of it affecting anything.\u201d\u00a0While 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cthe market\u201d will integrate all available information into that single number for them to optimize.<\/p>\n

But the problem is that \u201cthe market\u201d then becomes the ultimate accountability sink. The managers don\u2019t have to take responsibility for their decisions, because it\u2019s what \u201cthe market\u201d wanted. Investors in the stock don\u2019t have to take responsibility, because it\u2019s the managers making decisions about the company. There is nobody left to be responsible,\u00a0and 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. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

If you want to learn more, I wrote a longer summary with more details on the ideas at<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4292"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4292\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4388,"href":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4292\/revisions\/4388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}