Accountability (2/3): When good people get trapped in bad systems

The accountability paradox

You can have brilliant individual accountability and still fail as an organisation.

Every team hits their targets. Every individual delivers what they promised. Every department optimises for their key metrics. Yet customer value erodes, strategic initiatives die, and everyone wonders why success feels hollow.

This is the accountability paradox. The systems we create to ensure accountability often destroy the outcomes we’re trying to achieve. Good people become trapped in bad systems, and the harder they work within those systems, the further they drift from real value.

At the organisational level, new dynamics emerge that individual accountability patterns can’t address. Value gets fragmented across departmental boundaries. Local optimisation creates global dysfunction. Well-intentioned processes become impediments to the outcomes they’re designed to protect.

As W. Edwards Deming observed: “A bad system will beat a good person every time.” Systems are perfectly designed to get the results they get — and those may not be better value, sooner, safer, and happier (BVSSH).

Anti-patterns: When systems eat accountability

These organisational anti-patterns build upon those from part 1 — confusion over outcomes, inflicted accountability, accountability without authority, micromanagement and abdication, rigid goal adherence.

Organisational failures are often harder to spot because they emerge from well-intentioned people trapped in problematic systems.

Anti-pattern 6: The accountability hot potato

What it looks like: Critical outcomes get passed between departments like a hot potato. Customer experience spans marketing, sales, product, support, and delivery — but nobody owns the end-to-end journey.

When problems emerge, meetings multiply. RACI matrices get dusted off. But the fundamental issue remains: the outcomes that matter are not measured by individual departmental scorecards.

The human cost: Talented people become cynical. They hit their local targets while watching overall value drift away.

Impact: Customer value dies in handoffs. Strategic initiatives fragment across owners. Teams optimise locally while global outcomes decay.

Use: Pattern 6: Create value stream ownership

Anti-pattern 7: Success theatre

What it looks like: Dashboards glow green while customer satisfaction plummets. Teams celebrate hitting velocity targets while delivering features nobody uses. Everyone’s performing well in isolation, but collectively failing.

This is the most insidious anti-pattern because it feels like success. Meetings are full of positive updates. Performance reviews are glowing. Yet something fundamental is broken.

The human cost: People lose connection to real purpose. Work becomes performative rather than valuable.

Impact: Destroys feedback loops between effort and customer outcomes. Creates false confidence while problems compound.

Use: Pattern 7: Make value visible

Anti-pattern 8: The expertise trap

What it looks like: Critical knowledge lives in individual heads. When people leave, capabilities walk out the door with them. New leaders spend months figuring out what their predecessors were thinking.

The organisation becomes dependent on heroic individuals rather than building sustainable capability. Knowledge hoarding becomes rational behaviour because being indispensable feels safer than being replaceable.

The human cost: Enormous pressure on key individuals who become single points of failure. Newcomers feel overwhelmed by complexity they can’t decode.

Impact: Capability decay during transitions. Repeated restarts on long-term initiatives. Organisational learning that never compounds.

Use: Pattern 8: Build organisational memory

Anti-pattern 9: The approval death march

What it looks like: Good ideas die in approval processes. Risk aversion masquerades as good governance. Every innovation requires sign-off from people who don’t understand the problem, don’t face the consequences, and have different incentives.

Teams learn to ask for forgiveness rather than permission, or worse, they stop trying to innovate entirely.

The human cost: Talented people leave because they can’t get anything done. Those who stay learn to game the system rather than serve customers.

Impact: Innovation death. Competitive disadvantage as faster-moving organisations capture market opportunities.

Use: Pattern 9: Build quality and safety into the system of work

The patterns: How to free good people from bad systems

Pattern 6: Create value stream ownership

The pattern: Organise by customer value stream, not functional departments. The ideal is restructuring around value streams entirely, but if organisational politics make that impossible, create value stream owners who work across existing boundaries.

These owners need the authority to prioritise work across departments, resolve conflicts in favour of customer outcomes, and drive end-to-end flow. Think of them as the “network” overlay from Team of Teams — creating agile connections between slower-moving hierarchical structures.

This isn’t about adding another layer of management. It’s about creating integration points with the power to optimise for flow rather than local efficiency.

Why it works: Aligns action with customer value rather than departmental metrics. Reduces handoff delays and translation losses. Creates clear ownership for outcomes that matter most.

Principles: Customer value flow over departmental efficiency. End-to-end ownership over functional excellence. Integration authority over coordination overhead.

Pattern 7: Make value visible

The pattern: Measure and visualise the outcomes that actually matter to customers, not just the activities that feel productive. Make the connection between daily work and customer outcomes transparent and immediate.

Create dashboards that show customer value delivery, not just team productivity. Use leading indicators that predict outcome success, not just output measures. When teams can see how their work translates to customer benefit, they naturally align their efforts.

Why it works: Creates intrinsic motivation by connecting work to purpose. Enables course correction before failure. Builds shared understanding of what success actually looks like.

Principles: Outcomes over outputs. Customer value over activity metrics. Leading indicators over lagging measures.

Pattern 8: Build organisational memory

The pattern: Capture not just what decisions were made, but why they were made and what context influenced them. Create systems that help knowledge flow between people and persist beyond individual tenure.

Use decision records, context documentation, and communities of practice to build institutional memory. Make onboarding about inheriting rich context, not starting from scratch.

Why it works: Prevents capability decay during transitions. Enables compound learning rather than repeated mistakes. Accelerates time-to-value for new team members.

Principles: Institutional memory over individual knowledge. Context over conclusions. Sustainable capability over heroic delivery.

Pattern 9: Build quality and safety into the system of work

The pattern: Build quality and compliance into daily work rather than inspecting them in at the end. Embed governance capability within teams through automation, shared knowledge, or close partnership with specialists. Replace approval gates with minimal viable guardrails that enable innovation while ensuring safety.

Make risk tolerance explicit through clear boundaries, then trust teams to innovate within those constraints. Use transparency and peer accountability rather than permission-seeking processes.

Why it works: Catches issues early when they’re cheap to fix. Creates predictable flow by addressing constraints proactively. Builds confidence to move quickly while maintaining appropriate risk control.

Principles: Quality and safety built in, not inspected in. Shift left on compliance. Guardrails over approval gates. Transparency over oversight.

Themes

• Systems shape behaviour: The system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. Change the system to change the outcomes.
• Flow over local optimisation: End-to-end customer value over departmental efficiency. Optimise for the whole, not the parts.
• Transparency over control: Visibility creates natural accountability without management overhead. Trust emerges from open sharing, not inspection.
• Build in over inspect in: Quality, safety, and compliance as continuous capabilities, not end-stage gates. Prevention over detection.
• Organisational memory: Sustainable capability over heroic delivery. Knowledge that persists beyond individual tenure.

Further reading

• Sooner Safer Happier, Jonathan Smart et al.
• Team of Teams, Stanley McChrystal
• The Phoenix Project, Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford
• Accelerate, Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim
• The Fearless Organization, Amy Edmondson