A Language and Method for Increasing Accountability

Over half of all employees feel frustrated at work due to not having a shared way to reach and enforce accountable agreements.

(Source: Workplace Accountability Study of 40,000 professionals by Partners in Leadership.)

What sort of “shared way” do we need?

An Accountability Protocol.

When your team members have the language to speak with precision about what they are and are not agreeing to do, and when they have a method for holding all the conversations they need for reaching agreements, clarifying agreements, renegotiating agreements, and enforcing agreements, they feel enormously better. Their work improves. Trust improves.

A “communications protocol” is a formalized method by which parties communicate — how they will initiate and terminate conversations; what key words mean; what silence means in different contexts; and even how to detect and correct errors.

The Accountability Protocol is a communications protocol that specifies how parties will create and enforce Accountable Agreements.

The main structure in the Accountability Protocol is the Accountability Loop.

The Microstructures of the Accountability Loop

Accountability arises via a four phase loop process that will look familiar, because you already use it. Those phases are:

1. Initiate — an Asker asks a Doer to do something by delivering a Request for Performance.
2. Negotiate — the Doer and Asker exchange information and form an Accountable Agreement; that is, they get clear on what the Doer will do, and how the Asker will receive what’s done.
3. Perform — the Doer does the work agreed upon, and ends by notifying the Asker of completion.
4. Accept — the Asker informs the Doer if the work is acceptable.

Overview of the Accountability Loop, inspired by “Language/Action Perspective” by Winograd and Flores

Some of these phases can be so tiny we miss them, or may be omitted by silent mutual agreement:

1. Initiate: At lunch, you ask your colleague to pass the salt.
2. Negotiate: (No negotiation is needed.)
3. Perform: Your colleague passes you the salt.
4. Accept: You thank your colleague.

The phases need not be stated aloud:

1. Initiate: You are at lunch, but in a context where it’s inappropriate to speak, or it’s hard to be heard. You catch your colleague’s eye, then you make a salt-shaking gesture with your hand over your food, and then nod towards the salt shaker, which is next to a pepper shaker. Both are next to your colleague.
2. Negotiate: Your colleague holds his hand over both the salt and pepper shakers. He waggles his finger back and forth between the two, lifting his eyebrows in query. You jerk your chin towards the salt.
3. Perform: Your colleague passes you the salt.
4. Accept: You bow your head slightly in acknowledgement.

The phases can be quite large:

1. Initiate: US President John F. Kennedy publicly sets a goal to land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth by the end of the decade.
2. Negotiate: The President and Congress discuss at length how to pay for and supervise the work.
3. Perform: Under the supervision of the President and Congress, NASA puts a man on the moon and returns him safely to Earth.
4. Accept: The astronauts are given a ticker tape parade through New York City. Speeches and celebrations mark the success.

Notice that large loops are actually made up of many smaller loops in a recursive or fractal pattern. Here is a loop with one sub-loop:

I. Initiate: My wife asks me to hang a picture on a wall in our home.

II. Negotiate: We jointly measure and mark the wall and agree on the location, height, a hanging method, and by when the work must be finished.

III. Perform Part 1: I start to hang the picture, then discover I’m missing some parts. I pause work and start up a subloop.

Subloop

1. Initiate: I go on Amazon and search for the parts.
2. Negotiate: I place the parts order. (The order is the Mutual Agreement that marks the end of Negotiate.)
3. Perform: Amazon delivers my order.
4. Accept: (I don’t return the parts for a refund, so my acceptance is presumed.)

III. Perform Part 2: I finish hanging the picture and ask my wife to inspect the work.

IV. Accept: My wife says the picture is hung well enough.

(The alert reader will notice that what I consider a single, simple sub-loop, ordering parts from Amazon, actually contains a multitude of other loops inside Amazon. Part of the beauty of sub-loops is that they hide complexity.)

A small construction project will contain hundreds of Accountability Loops nested inside one another. A large project will contain thousands or more.

So What?

OK, so this loop structure exists, and we’re all of us already using it. So what?

So, knowing about the loop can help us to slow down and debug many of our problems of cooperation. Improving cooperation, in turn, boosts performance, morale, trust, and speed of execution. It eliminates many errors, and the costs and delays spawned by those errors.

Here are some common ways accountability can go wrong. This is by no means an exhaustive list.

1. Poor Initiation: Wilma walks by Fred’s desk and asks him to “handle the Smith situation” and keeps walking; she doesn’t explain what that means. Fred spends hours trying to figure it out. Wilma is gone and can’t be reached for clarification. Fred is forced to quiz colleagues and make guesses as to which Smith it is, what “handle” means, and what Wilma wanted done. He ultimately takes action based on his best guesses. Wilma returns and criticizes Fred for handling it incorrectly. Fred feels set up for failure, unjustly criticized, and alienated from Wilma. Wilma feels unsupported by her staff. Smith isn’t happy either.
2. Poor Negotiation: Wilma walks by Fred’s desk and asks him to “process the refund on the Smith order #423 ASAP” and leaves. Fred follows the department’s unwritten process and refunds the order by getting a paper check issued and mailed. Fred doesn’t tell Wilma what he did and she doesn’t ask. Weeks later Smith calls, furious. The check was sent to an old, now incorrect address, and Smith wanted an electronic transfer not a check. The Smith account is in jeopardy. Mutual recriminations ensue.
3. Incomplete Performance: Wilma asks Fred to fix the network router. She is waiting on this so she can start a key task, but doesn’t say this. Fred fixes it, then leaves for lunch and takes the rest of the day off as he’d previously planned with HR. He never informs Wilma that he finished or that he’s gone. Wilma doesn’t find out the router is fixed until mid-afternoon the following day; her work runs late and she stays at the office until midnight to finish. Her quality of work suffers, and she trusts Fred less. She feels let down.
4. Failed Acceptance: Barney asks Betty to create a CRM type spreadsheet of key clients for a meeting the next day. She does, and emails Barney to say she’s ready. He never replies. When the meeting happens, Barney presents his own spreadsheet, which duplicates the work Betty did. Betty’s version is never used; her work was completely wasted. Betty feels disrespected and demoralized.
5. Weak Yes during Negotiation: Wilma asks Betty to prepare a presentation for next Wednesday for a new potential client. Betty interrupts the request to say “sure!” with great enthusiasm but asks no other questions. Wilma wants to give Betty a chance, so says nothing and waits. By next Tuesday it’s clear Betty hasn’t actually done anything. Wilma works late to finish the presentation, but it has errors that aren’t caught in the rush. The firm looks incompetent to the potential client and Wilma looks bad in front of her boss and peers. Betty never apologizes or acknowledges her role. Wilma never brings it up, but stops giving Betty work, doing more herself.

In short, every phase of the Accountability Loop can go wrong in multiple ways. Often one instance of the Loop can have multiple errors, scattered across the four phases.

In human interactions, errors are to be expected. The wise person will use each error to better understand how to go through the Loop better the next time. With repetition and focus, the wise person and their team will become much better at doing excellent work each time through the loop, and errors will be quickly acknowledged, embraced, and learned from.

Often, errors cause our work relationships to get strained. But, a proper appreciation of the Accountability Loop allows you to transform each error into an improvement of your work relationships — while improving everyone’s performance.

Our goal ought not be to be perfect the first time, but rather, to get better every time.

Good, better, best.
Never let it rest.
’Til your good is better
and your better is best.

~ St. Jerome

Acknowledgment

I’m deeply grateful to Fernando Flores, whose book Conversations for Action has informed much of my work.

Learn More

To learn more about the forthcoming book The Accountability Protocol and how to be notified when it’s available, visit this link.

Excerpts on Medium from the Book The Accountability Protocol:

• A Language and Method for Increasing Accountability
• Initiating: The First Step in Accountability
• Lessons from a Lack of Accountability: A Story of Dropping the Ball, and How Not To
• Outcome or Activity? The First Question in Accountability