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Opening Salvo
A congressman introduced a bill this week barring federal candidates from betting on their own elections, after his own opponent got suspended from a platform for doing exactly that.
Easy to read that cynically and I partly do. What I keep landing on is that the rule applies to him, his race, and his family, with no carve-out for the person holding the pen.
I can’t tell you his motive and he probably can’t either. I can tell you the rule binds him, which is more than I can say for most of the accountability I get asked to design.
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The Fact Pattern
When your support agent gets it wrong, who's accountable?
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Talent Management 101 (TM101)
The Audience Condition
Accountability research defines accountability as the expectation of having to justify a judgment to someone, and the effect on judgment quality depends almost entirely on who that someone is. It improves judgment when the audience’s view is unknown and the justification is owed before the decision. It does nothing with no audience, and it makes judgment worse when the audience’s preference is known in advance, because the work shifts from getting it right to getting it defensible to that person.
A mechanism’s designer is usually in the third condition. They justify the design upward, to someone whose preference they already know, after the decision is effectively made.
Why It Happens
The designer’s audience is the approver: Justification runs toward the person who signs off rather than the population that lives in the mechanism, and those two want different things from it.
Scope is not read as exemption: Every boundary has an operational reason, so nobody has to defend the one that happens to exclude them.
Compliance data looks like outcome data: A mechanism reports its own uptake, which is the one number guaranteed to improve whether or not the thing is working.
Self-binding has no mover: Writing yourself into scope costs you now for a benefit that is diffuse, later, and credited to the system.
The Question Organizations Avoid
Which of your accountability mechanisms has ever produced a consequence for someone senior enough to change it?
The Plug
This newsletter is brought to you by AstutEdge, a performance improvement consultancy. We help organizations close the gap between what leadership intends and what actually gets executed by fixing the misalignment in people, systems, and structure that stalls results.
We work through consulting engagements and coaching. If your organization is producing effort without outcomes, let's talk.
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