Bi-directional accountability: A leadership shift most organizations avoid
alnewkirk.com
alnewkirk.com
The master algorithm for cultivating strong leadership is just Bayes' rule. If an employee makes good decisions they should have more influence over the organization's resources. If they make bad decisions they should have less influence over the organization's resources. Influence maps to probability.
Most organizations aren't setup to do this well. There is no where for bad leaders to go if they can't also contribute directly, and there is a reluctance to demote people or reduce their influence. A reluctance to demote has to be paired with a reluctance to promote. Consistently making good decisions is likely to be recognized artificially slowly, to prevent wage increases.
I also agree with point about canning or demoting senior staff. My better half had to deal with a complete jerk senior manager. It took an act of God to make the organization hold that clown accountable. In the end his team was downsized, but I'm not sure if he ever lost his title. Why? Senior managers + HR are serious believers in the unitary theory of the executive. As I say it takes an act of God to make them see what they did is not right by definition.
Facebook kicked off a bunch of 'metaverse' projects in 2020 (even literally renaming the company) and 5 years later, if their employee tenures average 2.5 years, their workforce will have turned over twice.
Can't expect someone to be "accountable" for promises made by their predecessor's predecessor.
The problem described is the symptom, not the cause. Trying to fix symptoms is futile, especially if one doesn’t even acknowledge the cause.
The cause is power asymmetry. The symptom is unaccountability of management to those they are managing.
Power asymmetry has some partial fixes, but the article mentions none of those and instead naively wishes that the consequences of concentrated power can be magically contracted away.
Who’s going to enforce the contract?
I.e.: Who’s going to arrest the King?
In practice 99% of large enterprise employees must “do as they’re told” and their only available alternative option is to quit.
I’ve never heard of any org where there is any kind of bottom-to-top accountability and if such a thing was promised I would be immediately suspicious that it’s just a gimmick intended to even further exploit the naive.
I don't see this as a bug, it's a forced feature of a program that needs some other parts fixed.
The problem isn't local to any organization, it's lack of functional competition and that's due to systemic reasons which are beyond the reach of CBC, bottom-up or internal anything.
In reality, I see CBC being deployed by leadership (i.e., by leaders, top-down) as a way of holding subordinates accountable more objectively. As a means of enabling meritocracy. As a signaling device to show credibility and fairness. As a management system that reduces politics and favoritism by forcing clarity. And as a cultural foundation that says: what matters here is outcomes, not optics (or theater).
It just so happens to apply equally to leadership also, because every leader is also a subordinate to someone, whether it’s a board, investors, customers, or the market itself. Most leaders aren't a god-emperor.
Power asymmetry always exists and in many tech orgs I have been, while the work of ICs is concrete and measurable (Jiras, commits, PRs, features, releases), the decision makers exist more in the verbal space where very little is committed to written form in a way that could lead to accountability.
The higher you go the less that meetings begin with an agenda or end with summarized minutes.
I had a former boss tell me an anecdote along these lines re: when he knew his days were numbered with his Director.
Director feigned ignorance of some inconvenient information so my boss reminds him that he had sent an email about it, to which the director responds "how do you know I read it, you can't just email me, you have to tell me next time".
Not an unreasonable response in isolation, however shortly later a similar discussion with the same Director feigning ignorance about another piece of inconvenient info, that went something like "I don't recall you telling me about this before, you really gotta put this stuff in email".
I know he was acting in bad faith because he pulled something similar on us where we proposed a plan of splitting some approved CapEx over 2 years to stretch capacity and get better hardware in year 2 for the same dollars. In year 2, of course, he grilled us about why we were asking him for servers again 2 years in a row and denied it.
It is next to impossible to enforce accountability upwards.
"I told you." -> "You didn't put that formally in writing."
"I told you and emailed you." -> "There were other (unspecified) priorities."
There's always an out.
but I agree, there is always some excuse.
While those who believe in contract driven accountability may constitute a minority, they could start a mailing list to coordinate and discover companies or startups applying these principles, and putting the rules into legally binding contracts and the company bylaws or whatever.
Nothing would happen until a local critical mass was reached, unless the work could be done remote at first. The first such companies could then spin out branches that do non-remote work (lab work, manufacture, ...).
The point of CBC (and bi-directional accountability) isn’t to "arrest the King." It’s to remove the cover of ambiguity that power relies on. In most orgs, leaders escape accountability not because they’re inherently unassailable, but because commitments are vague, undocumented, or endlessly reframed. CBC closes that escape hatch.
> "without checks"
Nobody in a position of power can be forced or even meaningfully incentivised to put checks on themselves so that their less powerful underlings can put their feet to the fire. This just doesn't happen. Saying that "CBC closes that escape hatch" is wishful thinking.
The hard part isn't specifying or documenting management's commitments. That already happens with, for example, politicians.
The effectively impossible part is enforcement and incentives. As in: there isn't any of either, and leadership holds all of the power, essentially by definition.
This CBC concept reads like one of those Web 3.0 fantasies where some kids whipping up Ethereum logic think that this somehow will force the real world into alignment with their code.
This. Just. Doesn't. Happen.
It never has and never will, because the status quo is fundamental human nature and a game-theoretically local optimum.
Feel free to propose how you intend to simultaneously fix our biological heritage and imbalanced power. But do please show your work instead of just waving your hands in the direction of some unenforceable paperwork that will certainly be ignored as soon as it is inconvenient for those in charge.
That's the incentive: CBC makes actual objective performance evaluation possible (i.e., performance evaluation for people and projects). And if a leader resists that? That's telling. It signals something about their leadership and the actual culture they're fostering. CBC is for leaders who claim to want meritocracy and are willing to prove it.
History gives us examples. Andy Grove at Intel famously institutionalized "constructive confrontation" and rigorous OKRs, explicitly binding executives, including himself, to objective measures of performance. It wasn't a loss of power; it was the foundation of Intel's execution culture and competitive edge.
CBC is cut from the same cloth. It doesn't magically enforce itself; it makes accountability legible, so leaders either live their stated values or reveal that they don't.
True, it doesn't, then what enforces it?
> Andy Grove & Intel's execution culture
Great example, and what happened next with his culture, him personally and why?
> it makes accountability legible, so leaders either live their stated values or reveal that they don't.
It could make a lot of good things happen... if it was somehow enforced, if it was implemented properly and supplied with adequate resources. None of these issues have been resolved, the rest is a pie in the sky.
Think about how societies enforce contracts in general. Governments could, in theory, just stop enforcing citizen/property rights or contracts. But they don't, because if they did, trust collapses, citizens revolt, and the system breaks down. Enforcement isn't about perfection; it's about enough stability that the system holds together.
CBC operates similarly. It doesn't create a new enforcement mechanism out of thin air, but it gives existing ones (boards, investors, regulators, peers, employees) something concrete to hold leaders to. Without CBC, there's no "thing" to point to when accountability is challenged. With it, there is.
And just like with governments, the possibility of negative consequences (talent attrition, investor pressure, loss of credibility) is what incentivizes leaders to treat the agreement seriously. CBC isn't pie in the sky; it's infrastructure for accountability. Enforcement comes from the same place it always has: the need for trust and legitimacy to keep the system functioning.
That’s what led to Collaborate by Contract (CBC). A desire to create a hierarchical map of decisions and commitments, and to force the hard questions and clarity upfront, and leave a record behind. Everyone in the org should be able to answer, at any moment: What are we doing, and why, and how, and with whom. Ideally, everyone in the org should be able to point to some artifact that can answer those questions. Without that agreement, you’re not managing execution, you’re managing stories (i.e., it's just theater IMHO).
This hits the nail on the head, I've heard all those excuses almost verbatim from upper management when proposing changes and I've countered all those objections with the answers given in the paragraph that follows. The current C-Suite thinks RTO is going to fix all the company problems and I'm out of ideas on how to effect meaningful change. My team is fantastic but interfacing with other directors/execs is a nightmare.
Do any of you that have gone through this have any advice, short of finding a new job?
“They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect
that no one will need to be good.
But the man that is will shadow
The man that pretends to be.”A search in Google for "Collaborate by contract" gives three results, all from the same person, all in the last few weeks. Including this new article it's 1776 words in total on CBC. It doesn't seem to be real or something that has been tried out in an organization. It appears to be Al Newkirk's idea for a system that could work, but has not been tried.
Specifically, I'd like to see an example of a contract and who agrees to it; what the journal of contracts looks like; what happens when after an agreement everyone learns something that they didn't know when the agreements were made; what are the leaders committing to and what happens when they fail to deliver that?
Links found on CBC: https://www.alnewkirk.com/bidirectional-accountability/ https://www.alnewkirk.com/understanding-collaborate-by-contr... https://www.alnewkirk.com/maybe-its-time-to-change-the-way-w... https://www.reddit.com/r/productivity/comments/1n04s5z/comme...
Many teams have working agreements; and companies have employee handbooks.
I don’t know if you ever read these in detail, but they’re generally in one direction. Other than dating/relationships (manager and direct reports, etc) and some generally applicable guidelines, it’s favorable to management.
One thing I make very clear to my direct reports is that I expect them to hold me to account when I fail to do something or hinder the team; even going above me if needed.
But this is ad-hoc. It’s not consistent across the board, and I see managers who are active hindrances to their team or their mission.
This is also the norm in many companies, and it’s a problem.
At the simplest level:
A CBC agreement is a short written contract between leaders and reports. Ideally, person to person, but leader and team is fine too. It defines the objective, deliverables, dependencies, expectations, and outcomes (i.e., success criteria). Work doesn't start until all parties agree.
A journal of contracts is just the running log of those agreements. Think of it as the team/dept/org's public ledger, what was agreed, by whom, when, and why, and ideally the artifact captures the negotiations and tradeoffs made to arrive at the final agreement. Patterns show up quickly (who delivers, who misses, where scope creep hides). This makes performance reviews objective and enables meritocracy.
Okay, things change, and sometimes new info emerges: agreements aren't stone tablets. So, agreements might include predefined checkpoints or "if/then" clauses. Instead of pretending we never change, CBC forces us to renegotiate in daylight, with both sides explicit about the cost of changing.
What leaders commit to: clarity, timely decisions, and removing dependencies. If a leader misses their side, say they don't secure the promised resource or they blow their own deadline, that's a contract miss just like an IC failing to deliver code. Also, by signing the agreement, the leader is sayin,g "I agree with this plan/strategy." In CBC, credibility runs both ways.
It's early, and I'm still publishing examples and tooling. But the premise is simple: if you can't write it down, negotiate it, and sign it, it's not really a commitment, it's just vibes.
Also, no, it's not Waterfall, because it's more about documenting "expectations" and "outcomes" than about specifying particular work activities.
cc quag
I'm curious about it and your thinking on how to track things over time and see what has surprised us since we got started. It is useful to note down every time you (or your team) sets an expectation with someone (or another team) and then make sure you don't forget about that. It's also useful to be deliberate when setting expectations.
Having a public journal could well work for noting down when expectations are set and whenever there is a meeting of minds. I've found when tracking things like this that the amount of data can quickly grow to the point where you can no longer quickly and easily reason about it. The success seems to live and die on the data visualization or UI/UX.