Accountable or Responsible

-- The telecom company had to come back twice to fix your triple play installation (telephony, internet, cable television), yet the telecom company proudly publishes very high service levels and customer satisfaction.

-- You complain about the service or the cleanliness in a public facility and they point you to a sticker providing you with a 1-900 number for "suggestions and ideas," $0.49 per minute.

-- The agent in the centralized call center of the police doesn't recognize the name of the street where you report an accident in, and also doesn't know about the roadworks that make it hard to reach the place.

-- The helpdesk reports high effectiveness rates, 80%+ of all inquiries are solved immediately, and tickets can be closed again. At the same time, the employee satisfaction survey show a high dissatisfaction with IT.

-- The hospital informs you that you are on the waiting list for the waiting list?!?

-- . . . and you recently received an email survey asking you how satisfied you were with the previous satisfaction survey.

These are all actual examples of what happens if you drive too much efficiency.

In the last twenty years, most public and private organizations have gone through multiple rounds of reorganization, squeezing cost out while aiming for operational excellence. Governments have privatized healthcare and social services, to be more run as a business, and have introduced competition. Companies have outsourced business processes to shared service centers that offer economies of scale and strict division of labour. Although the cost structure has improved significantly, there are adverse effects.

Now, on top of the requirements for even more increased efficiency and operational excellence, organizations are faced with the need for being accountable as well. If not addressed well, it can lead to dysfunctional behaviors, running the numbers instead of running the business. This effect is documented very well. The police station doesn't want to get called directly anymore, because then calls are not registered in the central system, that is needed for reporting. Hospitals create an unoffical waiting list before you get on the actual waiting list, because the official waiting list counts for the statistics. Every department of the telecom operator claims to have 95% success rate, but as a value chain it scores 0.95 x 0.95 x 0.95 x 0.95 x 0.95 = 77% success.

At the same time, optimizations led to a high level of specialization. Management guru Mintzberg explains how modern enterprise often traded in "mission goals" (what do we like to achieve) to "system goals" (how can we manage our process). Another way of saying this is that organizations focus on accountability, instead of responsibility. Accountability focuses on displaying what you do. Responsibility on what you achieve for your stakeholders, such as your customers, your partners, your investors and society at large. In organizations that are highly optimized towards specific activities, instead of in charge of a complete process, it is even very hard to take responsibility, every department is simply a small link in the overall chain. Then accountability is all what is left.

If you are not in touch anymore with the end result for consumers or citizens, all you can do is set goals for your own part in the process. All you can do is measure your input and your output, but not your effect. All you can do is create controls to optimize your performance and minimize your cost. And no one is responsible anymore for the overall result.

Don't get me wrong, I am not opposing accountability. However, I am against playing games with performance indicators. We should organize ourselves so that we can take responsibility for what we achieve. And that is not that hard to do, if we let go all kinds of organizational "best practices" and start thinking for ourselves. So not only measuring our own stuff, but also what we achieve for other. And most of all, let's not talk about "internal customers" anymore, but call them what they are: colleagues, with the same objectives and the same customers. And one last piece of advice: if you notice that performance indicators stand in the way of doing the right thing,  it would be great to take responsibility and do the right thing, never mind the performance indicators.

--frank