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Comment by outlace | Hacker News Reader

This is focused on organizations but I will emphasize how moving from blame to accountability (or ownership) is a transformative stance for ourselves as individuals (as described in Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink). We often try to protect our egos by shifting blame, making excuses or just avoiding challenges altogether because blame and failure are such a negative experience. But instead of self-blame if you instead decide to take ownership, where you take responsibility for everything in your world, it becomes a kind of game of how you can level up to better master the world. You also focus on where you want to go and how to get there and stop beating yourself up for not being there already. Mistakes stop being so painful and instead become welcome gradient signals to level up. You start seeking out challenges to acquire more skills to get where you want to go.

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I can speak to this. In one life I am a part time military officer with 5 deployments to the Middle East. At the exact same time I am a corporate software developer for my primary career. The greatest difference between these worlds is:

Leadership

Ownership is certainly a primary part of that, but there is more to this than what most people from the corporate world can envision unless if you have been at a director level (or higher) in a company that is more than a start up.

Ownership directly implies liability. If you fail wrongly this can mean losing your job, permanently losing your career, losing personal money, or even going to prison depending upon the context. Many professions have that, but software does not. In fact software directly stresses the opposite of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35889282

Leadership means to own risks and liability, but it also means owning the welfare of the people that work for you. Another primary part of leadership, equivalent to ownership, is communication. Good communication comprises the ability to provide specific instructions to subordinates so that they never must ask for clarity, as though you are using empathy to read their minds. Simultaneously it also means the ability to persuade peers and superiors to change position on an opinion beneficial to your team/mission. If you are good at this it will appear almost invisible to your staff and exceedingly self-sacrificing to your superiors.

I'm accountable or 'own' my designs end to end. which means I want and need to help the people or experts who should know their job (who sometimes give BS)

Yes I write highlevel risks about the information I'm given could be wrong (to cover my backside) but you have to be thorough. Its makes you a better technical person or a better engineer. where by you dissect and rebuild information given to check it's right and to spot inconsistanses.

It's like solving a puzzle, but like a good puzzle it can be sometimes tedious, slow and time consuming. but when you find issues that could cost hundreds of thousands of pounds/ dollars through mistakes it really makes up for it.

Ultimately, if you are "accountable" for everything in the world, then what you must do is establish control over everything in the world. Anything that cannot be controlled must be shackled and harnessed. Any independent behaviors by others must be extinguished; they must be turned into compliant automatons to be pushed this way or that by force. Nature also must be eliminated. It is illegible; you cannot understand or control it; it has to be paved over so that a Cartesian grid of parking spaces can be painted on it. Anyone who isn't you must be in chains.

> Ultimately, if you are "accountable" for everything in the world, then what you must do is establish control over everything in the world.

This seems rather extreme. To me "accountable" means "accountable for your _reaction_" in this context. I don't think (or at least hope that) anybody advocating this stance is seeking to "eliminate nature" so much as accept it as it is and deal with it on a realistic basis.

As an illustrative example I ride motorcycles on the street. It is a fact of nature that people are going to try and merge into me or cut me off and threaten my life. Blaming them and being angry about it leads to poor outcomes in the form of aggressive and dangerous riding. Instead I focus on mitigating risk by wearing appropriate safety gear and anticipating bad drivers' actions so as to avoid it. I do not seek to control others so much as to maximize the value of my interaction with them by taking ownership of it.

Everything in your world. You decide on the system boundaries. If you haven’t already I’d recommend watching the accompanying TED talk

I take the bait: of course you can't control the weather. So you plan to hiking, so instead of getting soaked when it rains — you can pack an umbrella or a poncho.

So who's fault is it that you got wet? The weather? Was there nothing that could have been done?

Maybe it's your responsibility to plan for bad weather?

I see a lot of value in this take, and think pushing it to an extreme helps highlight the balancing act that is required.

Also GP's point refers to "Extreme Ownership" by Jocko Willink, and from that title it looks fair to effectively imagine the extreme.

GP mentions how focusing on accountability changes the approach to failures, and I'd totally see people taking the wrong lessons from a project where they didn't stop a colleague from doing something that happened to be a bad decision.

> Anyone who isn't you must be in chains.

You speak for yourself, not for me.

Those different than me often contribute in ways I did not see. Life is better when I embrace improvement.

What is the purpose of this type of reductionist poopooing? Are you advocating that accountability is undesirable? Of are you just flexing your intellect?

The basic flaw in this thought exercise of yours is, no one is actually '"accountable" for everything' with the power or desire to enact the consequences you listed. That said, there is nothing wrong with modeling that I am accountable for everything and accepting chaos theory as a unavoidable attribute of the world. This means that me being accountable and things going wrong does not necessitate any of the things you listed "independent behaviors by others must be extinguished" as this is just a sociopathic way of thinking on the path to destruction.

I think the takeaway consideration is to select products services and solutions that aren't predicated on an assignment of blame or responsibility, but based on your own accountable understanding of risk as it applies to business and processes.

Far too often are we outsourcing in order to avoid the difficult and often times very wholistic concern of risk and outcome. Blame serves no shareholder value but to abdicate leadership from their post.

This seems like a great way to develop or exasperate mental illnesses like OCD.

you may mean exacerbate

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