It was this fully automated airport, where the checkin is self serviced and you only interact with computers.
Eventually, when I inserted my boarding pass I had a printed piece of paper back that said that they had to change my seat from aisle to midseat
I then tried to find someone to talk to the entire way, but computers can only interact in the way the UI was designed, and no programmer accounted or cared for my scenario
The ground attendant couldn't have done anything of course because it wasn't part of the scope of her job, and this was the part of germany where nice was not one of their stereotypes.
Eventually I got a survey a week later about a different leg of the flight, so could I really complain there? that one was fine? I had a paranoid wonder if that was intentional
I arrived at the train station in the night after 6 hours train journey. German Railways app shows there will be my final leg train in 45 minutes. I wait in the cold at night, sitting in the station building because it's warmer there. 5 minutes before departure I go on the platform. The local display shows no train, even though the all still shows it. I waited for nothing.
Syncing the app with the train station? Somebody else's problem.
In half an hour there should be a replacement bus for another cancelled train. There are no signs in the app or the station that indicate where that bus is to be found. You just need to know.
Putting sings for replacement buses due to degraded service that's long planned and already happening for 2 months? Somebody else's problem.
An old man asks if the bus will allow to catch the train connection at its destination. The bus driver bitches at him for asking that question -- not his job. Somebody else's problem.
Training the bus driver that, being an official replacement of a train, he needs to know that, clearly also somebody else's problem than that of the German Railways.
It's pitch black outside, the windows are opaque due to moisture, so I can't tell where we are even though I was born the area and lived here for 18 years. The bus driver makes no announcements about the stops, there is no display. Knowing when to request a stop to get off? Somebody else's problem.
The bus is ice cold for an hour. When am old lady gets off and tells the bus driver that it was freezing all journey, he asks "well what can you do". Bewildered she answers "turn on the heating"? He didn't expect that. He seemed to think that everything except driving was somebody else's problem.
This is just one night's bus journey story. I also got my SIM card deleted and a parcel was lost in the subsequent week. Documenting here the amounts of "somebody else's problem" I encountered in their customer support hotlines is somebody else's problem for me for now.
I got the feeling that papers were being pushed around from desk to desk until a vacant desk came along and progress stalled.
In the same job, I worked with Americans. Very nice people and super easy to get along with. Always friendly and with a healthy sense of humor. A certain lightness of heart was always present even when dealing with urgent or negative matters. Only thing was that they made a lot of mistakes that often didn’t seem accidental — I saw a bit of negligence, along the lines of “if someone took just one look at this, they’d be able to tell in seconds what’s wrong”.
I have experienced this many times. Thankfully the bus drivers here in Hungary are pretty helpful (well, in my county at least), and worst case: you ask other passengers who also happen to be friendly. When it is pitch black outside and the windows are opaque due to moisture, it is not only your problem, but everyone else's, and people often find a way to cooperate and work together.
Sadly I don’t expect this all to get any better with robots and LLms and thing. We will be crying to meet a human sooner than later, and my hope is this far cry will eventually get us to the dawn of new era when you actually have people in the loop, just for humanity’s sake.
It sounds like this was the main point of failure. I’m not sure it can be considered an error in the system. I’d consider the risk inherent in traveling in a country without knowing its language.
Hiding the customer service number. Making an FAQ that is missing the common but time-consuming questions. Chatbots instead of people.
I remember when amazon sent me a package once, said it was delivered, but it was nowhere to be found. There was no way to get help. They did have an FAQ at the time that said to check in the bushes.
What was annoying was the search auto-complete had many variations of "package not found says delivered"
Now, it is a little more filled out but still.
* not that I could tell if they were LLMs
I go through the usual hoops: press 1 for English, "we detected an account linked to the number you're calling from, is that that you're calling about?" ... Press 1 for support, press 1 for Internet, "no outages detected in your area. Most problems can be solved by rebooting your modem. Press 1 if you want to try rebooting." (Pause)... "thank you for your call click"
First off, rebooting doesn't solve my problem. But I guess I have to try anyway?
So I call back, this time I do pick to reboot, and get "your modem will reboot in the next few minutes, and could take up to 10 minutes to come online. If things still aren't working, try our online support chat"
So, basically there doesn't seem to be any phone technical support (with a human), at all.
Also, rebooting is offensive to me as a programmer. Kernel updates and memory leaks are the only reason you need to reboot. How absolutely shitty is modem firmware that the ISP actually spent the time to build this reboot system out??(Never mind that I personally don't feel like I've ever had a modem/isp actually problem solved by rebooting)
Made me wonder if I should have switched.
Make a good faith effort to get your problem addressed, and record the fact that you've done so to use in your hearing if it gets that far. Then just file the claim. Generally they fold immediately, and this way you incentivize actual customer service in the only language they understand.
what country is this "small claims court" in? And are you sure this country's small claims works the way your country does?
Since at least in that scenario, there were humans in the Bureaucracy that could (but didn’t particularly) feel bad.
In this scenario, no humans need to be directly involved, which allows the scope and scale to be even more Dystopian.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/mediaviewer/rm557755905...
Meow!
So this might be the reason you had to change seats.
That book is now almost old enough to have a programming job.
This is a strong reason that corporations should not be considered people. People are long-lived entities with accountability and you can't just create or destroy them at will.
It's the profitable course.
As well as after they do something there is typically a recourse path provided by that org for you to protest their decisions and if that doesn't resolve favorable you can also sue them.
Which differs from the article because the corporation doesn't provide any protest path nor did it have to publish any memo/etc describing how they're going to downsize cleaning for cost-savings. But you can still sue them (but good luck showing damages over an unclean room)!
Ambrose Bierce already hit the nail on the head in 1911:
"Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility."
It has long since baffled me this isn't being talked about more – I guess everyone is just so used to it. As far as I'm concerned the entire concept of "fining a company" should be abolished and replaced with the criminal persecution of those who did the illegal thing.
This notion is currently being contested
I think a good example of the dichotomy here is Starlink. On one hand, it's an incredibly useful service that often has a positive impact. On the other hand, a private corporation is just polluting our low earth orbit with thousands of satellites.
It's not clear to me where exactly the right balance for something like this should be, but I do think that as of today, we're too far on the lessez-faire side.
Seems like a terrible example to me. I'm no fan of Musk, but I don't see how that is "polluting".
They provide an excellent service. They're a minor hindrance for astronomy, true, but I think it would be hard to make a good case for that a few people having a good view of the sky is more important than millions having good communications.
Then there's that there's nothing really special about Starlink. It's merely one of the first users of cheap rocket launches. It could be somebody else, or 1000 different entities launching smaller numbers, in the end the effect on astronomy would be the same.
Cathy argues that the use of algorithm in some contexts permits a new scale of harmful and unaccountable systems that ought to be reigned in.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/241363/weapons-of-m...
"A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a Management Decision." IBM presentation, 1979
IBM in 1979 was not doing anything different to 2024. They were just more relevant
= Presentation, 21st Century
A computer is not alive. A computer system is a tool that can do harm. It can be disconnected or unplugged like any tool in a machine shop that begins to do harm or damage. But a tool is not responsible. Only people are responsible. Accountability is anchored in reality by personal cost.
= Notes
Management calculates the cost of not unplugging the computer that is doing harm. Management often calculates that it is possible to pay the monetary cost for the harm done.
People in management will abdicate personal responsibility. People try to avoid paying personal cost.
We often hold people accountable by forcing them to give back (e.g. community service, monetary fines, return of property), by sacrificing their reputation in one or more domains, by putting them in jail (they pay with their time), or in some societies, by putting them to death ("pay" with their lives).
Accountability is anchored in reality by personal cost.
Algorithms are used by people. An algorithm only allows "harmful and unaccountable systems" if people, as the agents imposing accountability, choose to not hold the people acting by way of the algorithm accountable on the basis of the use of the algorithm, but...that really has nothing to do with the algorithm. If you swapped in a specially-designated ritual sceptre for the algorithm in that sentence (or, perhaps more familiarly, allowed "status as a police officer" to confer both formal immunity from most civil liability and practical immunity from criminal prosecution for most harms done in that role), it functions exactly the same way: what enables harmful and unaccountable systems is when humans choose not to hold other humans accountable for harms, on whatever basis.
"The Unaccountability Machine," based on Mandy's summary in the OP, argues that organizations can become "accountability sinks" which make it impossible for anyone to be held accountable for problems those organizations cause. Put another way (from the perspective of their customers), they eliminate any recourse for problems arising from the organization which ought to in theory be able to address, but can't because of the form and function of the organization.
"Weapons of Math Destruction" argues that the scale of algorithmic systems often means that when harms arise, those harms happen to a lot of people. Cathy argues this scale itself necessitates treating these algorithmic systems differently because of their disproportionate possibility for harm.
Together, you can get big harmful algorithmic systems, able to operate at scale which would be impossible without technology, which exist in organizations that act as accountability sinks. So you get mass harm with no recourse to address it.
This is what I meant by the two pieces being complementary to each other.
Judge, Jury and Executioner Firing Squad Limited Liability Organisation
Humans like to sleep at night. An emergent property of our rule of law is that it exists in a way to reduce the moral culpability of any individual. A police man, a jury member, a judge, a inspector, an executioner, a jailer, they all exist in very neat boxes. These boxes allow them to sleep at night. Surely the Judge has few qualms going by the recommended mandatory minimum, after the jury, who is assured the judge will provide a fair sentence, and the executioner doubly so, with double the potential moral hazard, is certain at least two other parties have done their due diligence.
these systems prevent a single actor from acting. More like they allow a series of hand offs, so by the time the jailer is slamming the doors shut, they are bereft of any investment in the morality of the outcome
The firing squad, with seven guns, all line up, with just one loaded. The rest are blanks. Each man can sleep at night, regardless if the murdered man was surely deserving of death
large institutions, organizations and objects are scale are fully inhumane
I would rather have my jailer be my judge and my executioner be each man or woman on the jury. Isolating each of these things allows the individuals to have almost a powerless notion of 'completing our task'. As if all tasks completed would add up to a moral outcome
Should juries be formed to perform the whipping of an individual, the institutionalization in their own homes, the judge forced to starve a prisoner in his cell, i find the outcomes would be different
Letting juries perform executions and judges be responsible for the imprisonment of the guilty just creates a massive perverse incentive for sadistic individuals.
You wrongly assume that either judge or jury would be more empathetic if they were burdened with the weight of these things. Instead, you'll get the people you least want in charge of these things doing them.
Aside from the method of using blanks at executions, everything else about the system protects the convicted, not the people in the system itself.
Of course you can run a political party suggesting that this division of powers thing was a step in the wrong direction, or better yet, take a trip to any of the dozens of countries with superdictators.
If we eat meat, we should kill it ourselves.
I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with eating animals. But I have a particularly carnivorous friend who thinks hunting is for sociopaths, because he “loves animals”.
If I wouldn’t harvest it, I won’t eat it. And I definitely would be too timid to slaughter a freaking cow lol
Surely this line of reasoning requires the presence of omniscient judgement (ie the abrahamic god) to make sense. Otherwise all gunmen would (and should) assume practical responsibility
> In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held directly accountable for it.
Why not just call it "no-consequence sinks"?
It's somewhat of an oxymoron to say "accountability" isn't working because there's no consequence. Without any consequence there is no accountability. So why call it accountability in the first place?
This article is describing something along the lines of "shared accountability" which, in project management, is a well known phenomenon: if multiple people are accountable for something, then no one is accountable.
If someone is accountable for something that they can't do fully themselves, they are still accountable for setting up systems (maybe even people to help) to scale their ability to remain accountable for the thing.
It’s all kinda mushy. Being accountable is hearing and knowing a story. I don’t see why that has to correlate with decision power.
The point of the article could be made much more clearly by talking about systems that leave decision makers not aware of the consequences of their decisions. All the anecdotes in the article fit that pattern.
I think people don’t use the language of decision-consequences because it doesn’t capture an emotional aspect they’d rather not say out loud. They want the decision maker to feel their pain, they want the decision maker to hurt.
Decision makers can be aware of how many unready rooms are caused by less cleaning staff, how many flights they’re cancelling. I’d actually bet they are. But that’s not enough, the harmed person wants to tell their story.
You're a neolithic farmer, and plant your barley, but that year there's a drought; you suffer the consequences, but who (or what) do you hold accountable?
In certain fields, there is a serious and distinct difference between Accountability, Responsibility, Consulting, and Informing.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_assignment_ma...
There’s a whole philosophy behind it. My spidey senses tingle when those words get misconstrued.
> The fundamental law of accountability: the extent to which you are able to change a decision is precisely the extent to which you can be accountable for it, and vice versa.
No.
You can absolutely be accountable for something that you can’t change a decision about. Simple example: You’re a branding agency and you decide to rename X to Y. (No pun intended). The rebrand to Y fails. You’re accountable for the failure, but likely don’t have the ability to change anything by the time you know the results of your decision.
Edit: ok, fair I agree. Bad example. A simpler example would be the person in the article continuing to point the the boss above them until there’s no one left. The chain would break somewhere along the way, but the broken chain is communication rather than one of accountability.
The information may not reach the person able to make a change. But that doesn’t make them not accountable. If that person is unable to make a change because they’re in vacation for a month without anyone filling in, that person is accountable for both the results AND future results that are caused by not having someone monitor/reroute their acckuntability.
> Davies gives the example of the case of Dominion Systems vs Fox News, in which Fox News repeatedly spread false stories about the election. No one at Fox seems to have explicitly made a decision to lie about voting machines; rather, there was an implicit understanding that they had to do whatever it took to keep their audience numbers up.
Rupert Murdoch conceded under oath that "Fox endorsed at times this false notion of a stolen election."[1] He knew the claims were false and decided not to direct the network to speak about it otherwise.
Communications from within Fox, by hosts, show they knew what they were saying was false.[2]
These two examples clearly fit the definition of lying [3].
The "External Links" section of Wikipedia gives references to the actual court documents that go into detail of who said what and knew what when [4]. There are many more instances which demonstrate that, indeed, people made explicit decisions to lie.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/02/28/1159819849/fox-news-dominion-...
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/dominion-releases...
[3] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/lie
[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Voting_Systems_v._F...
It happened without coordination and later on wasn't stopped by the people in management, either.
It was number-2 all the way up.
So, your point is entirely irrelevant.
You logic is flawed at the core. With that train of thought you can infer everything.
Why trust voting it can be manipulated.
A lot of corporations now seem to have a structure where the org chart contains the following pattern:
- a "management layer" (or several of them) which consists of product managers, software developers, ops people, etc. The main task of this group is to maintain and implement new features for the "software layer", i.e. the company's in-house IT infrastructure.
Working here feels very much like working in a tech company.
- a "software layer": This part is fully automated and consists of a massive software and hardware infrastructure that runs the day-to-day business of the company. The software layer has "interfaces" in the shape of specialized apps or devices that monitor and control the people in the "worker's layer".
- a "worker's layer": This group is fully human again. It consists of low-paid, frequently changing staff who perform most of the actual physical work that the business requires (and that can't be automated away yet) - think Uber drivers, delivery drivers, Amazon warehouse workers, etc.
They have no contact at all with the management layer and little contact, if any, with human higher-ups. They get almost all their instructions through the apps and other interfaces of the software layer. Companies frequently dispute that those people technically belong to the company at all.
Whether or not those people are classified as employees, the important point (from the management's POV) is that the software layer serves as a sort of "accountability firewall" between the other two layers.
Management only gives the high-level goal of how the software should perform, but the actual day-to-day interaction with the workers is exclusively done by the software itself.
The result is that any complaints from the worker's layer cannot go up past the software - and any exploitative behavior towards the workers can be chalked up as an unfortunate software error.
The only thing that changed is that now instructions and procedures are oftentimes executed by software and hardware, not by actual human beings. Hence the use of software engineering wing, in addition to your usual, sorry for the lack of better word, “meat programmers” aka organisational execs.
Interestingly, the end result customers get has not changed, despite many people coloring it that way. People still get same cup of coffee or a taxi ride, just quicker/cheaper/marginally better. But such incremental improvements were achievable in the business world before IT era using same exact means, through internal product management and imrovement of org procedures, applied to people and processes instead of pieces of software.
I still think there is some difference in kind, not just degree: A human operational exec at least has to engage with the workers personally, witness the conditions they are working in, is exposed to complaints, etc. Even the most uncaring foreman is therefore forced into a position where he is subjected to accountability. He also has personal contact with the upper layer and can pass on that accountability to his higher-ups.
In contrast, a software layer is physically unable to hear complaints and to pass them back up the chain. Because it's not a human, it cannot take accountability itself - however, it can still give higher-ups plausible deniability about "not having known" about problems. (A knock-on effect is also that it will prevent workers from even attempting to communicate the problem, because no one wants to talk to a wall)
Therefore it creates an accountability sink where there was none in the old structure.
(None in theory at least, of course there were enough other ways to be shielded from accountability even before computers)
If you have 1 candidate, it's an easy call, if you have 3 candidates, you evaluate in less than a week. If you have 200 candidates, you need to hire somebody to sift through the resumes, have like 5 rounds on interview and everybody chiming in, whoever pulls the trigger or recommends someone is now on the hook for their performance.
You can't evaluate all the information and make an informed decision, the optimal strategy is to flip a 100 sided die, but no one is going to be on the hook for that.
That's not how accountability works, in the traditional sense.
What you described is Person A (accountable for hiring) hiring person B (responsible for screening and evaluating candidates). Person A is still accountable for the results of Person B. If Person B hired a sh*t candidate, it still lands on Person A for not setting up an adequate hiring system.
Being accountable for something doesn't forbid you from delegating to other people. It is very common for 1 person to be accountable for multiple people's work.
it just so happened.
One way or another you gotta own the decisions you make and deal with it. Even if the decision is to let someone else make the decision.
The issue is that, yes, absolving yourself of accountability sure does free you to scale in ways previously thought unimaginable, it doesn't mean you absolve yourself of responsibility. The cure is keeping accountability in favor of scaling which means a much smaller scale to everything we have been doing.
Another way to think about it. If you said you would give me 1 million dollars but I had to fully own up to what 1000 random people do in the next 24 hours I'd say thats a pretty raw deal. Basically no chance that a million will cover the chaos that a few of those 1000 people could cause. What some people do is take the million and then figure out how to rid themselves of the reponsibility.
Sure. And the article allows for that. You need to have "an account" that acknowledges that at the time you didn't and couldn't have enough information to completely de risk the decision, but that you'd discussed and agreed that the 1/100 (or 1/5 or 1/10,000) risk of the bad outcome was a known and acceptable risk.
"where an account is something that you tell. How did something happen, what were the conditions that led to it happening, what made the decision seem like a good one at the time? Who were all of the people involved in the decision or event?"
The idea of "unaccountable" failures only makes sense if both (a) the problem is so systemic that actually an executive is accountable, (b) the executive is so far removed in the hierarchy from the line employees doing the work that nobody knows each other or sometimes even sits on the same campus, (c) the levers available to the executive to fix the problem are insufficient for fixing the problem, e.g. the underlying root cause is a culture problem, but culture is determined by who you hire, fire, and promote, while hiring and firing are handled by "outside" HR who are unaccountable to the executive who is supposedly accountable. But really this is another way of saying that accountability is simply another level higher, i.e. it is the CEO who is accountable since both the executive and HR are accountable to the CEO.
No, you have to have an astoundingly large organization (like government) to really have unaccountability sinks, where Congress pass laws with explicit intent for some desired outcome, but after passing through 14 committees and working groups the real-language policy has been distorted to produce the exact opposite effect, like a great big game of telephone, one defined by everyone trying to de-risk, because the only genuine shared culture across large organizations is de-risking, and it is simply not possible to actually put in place both policy and real-life changes to hiring, firing, and promotion practices in the public sector to start to take more risks, because at the end of the day, even the politicians in Congress are trying to de-risk, and civil servants burning taxpayer money on riskier schemes is not politically popular, though maybe it should be, considering the costs of de-risked culture.
The book's point is that while this _should_ be the case, all too often it's not. AFAIK, nobody has been charged with forging documents in the case of Wells Fargo cross selling. Not the counter clerks who directly responded to incentives and management pressure nor the executives who built that system.
This is exactly why being an executive of a large organization is so incredibly difficult to pull off well. Sure, you can let your assistant fill your calendar with a bunch of meetings you don't want to be in to spend 95% of the meeting listening, 4% being the arbiter who tells people what they already knew they needed to do but refused to do it until asked by someone in authority, and 1% saying you'll take it further up the ladder. You will also fail hard because you will be constantly blindsided by people either fucking up (at best) or gaming (at worst) the processes for which you are responsible. Small example litmus test: in organizations that use Jira, whether the executives are comfortable with JQL and building their own dashboards to tell them what they need to know, or whether they expect their direct reports to present their work. If it's the latter, how can an executive be surprised that their reports are always coming in with sunny faces and graphs going up and to the right?
That too many companies are not willing to hold executives accountable for processes that they are, in theory, supposed to be accountable for is an entirely different problem. The law proscribes, the officer arrests, and the judge presides, but all rests upon the jury to convict. If a company's "jury" is not willing to "convict", because the crime is one of negligence and not treason, then the company has larger problems and I'd like to short their stock, please.
So the only one with consistent power over all groups is an executive so high up the food chain (in some cases not even the CEO!) that they can plausibly claim ignorance.
One of his examples is that you should make yourself unavailable for contact, when you suspect someone is trying to blackmail you.
That's exactly the same severing of a link as described in the article.
Maybe I'm missing something, but how often does blackmail happen that it rises to the level of needing strategic advice like "make yourself unavailable" ?
Who is Tom Schelling's audience?
Politicians setting policies for use of nuclear weapons during the cold war, IIRC. Among others, at least.
I read parts of that book many years ago, I recall the major theme is that voluntarily sacrificing control over the situation can be a powerful way to force the other party to do what you want. Like if you and me are playing "chicken", speeding towards each other and wanting the other to turn away first, you ripping out your steering wheel and throwing it out for me to see is a guaranteed way to force me to turn first and lose. This kind of stuff.
I guess it ties into the larger topic here in that you can avoid being held accountable if you remove the ability to make any choices yourself.
Parents, of course.
You might think I'm joking, but dealing with toddlers throwing tantrums is a prime example in some of his books.
At the same time, though, I think it's a mistake to leave out the fact that, in many ways, modern society is just so fundamentally complex that we (as a society at large) deliberately forego demanding accountability because we believe the system is so complex that it's impossible to assign blame to a single person.
For example, given this is HN and many of us are software developers, how many times have we collectively supported "blameless cultures" when it comes to identifying and fixing software defects. We do this because we believe that software is so complex, and "to err is human", that it would be a disservice to assign blame to an individual - we say instead that the process should assume mistakes are inevitable, and then improve the process to find those mistakes earlier in the software lifecycle.
But while I believe a "blameless culture" is valuable, I think a lot of times you can identify who was at fault. I mean, somebody at CrowdStrike decided to push a data update, without verifying it first, that bluescreened a good portion of the world's Windows machines and caused billions in damages.
I just think that if you believe "accountability sinks" are always a bad thing, don't forget the flip side: would things always be better if we could always assign "root cause blame" to a specific individual?
Accountability, at least as presented here, is about feeeback between those affected by a decision and those making it. In a "blameless culture", people are still held to account for their decisions and actions but are not blamed for their results.
I would argue that a blameless culture actually makes accountability sinks less likely to develop. In blameful cultures, avoiding accountability avoids blame, but that is not needed in a blameless culture.
And the process of getting the money is reasonably straightforward.
There is a flag on my LinkedIn account that bars me from getting a "follow-me" link on my profile.
No one of their support team knows why. No one knows since when. No one knows when it will change.
We are already living in this world.
Accountibility always was down. Back in aristocracy you were never allowed to ask for support. Only in modern civilisation this improved. Middle management, the clueless in the Gervais principle, need their walls.
Don't be fooled by the decline of customer support in big orgs, like Google, Apple, or Amazon. They believe that support cannot scale, or if it's really needed, it needs to be outsourced to India or East Asia.
I disagree. They believe that support shouldn't scale with the size of the business, and should provide economies.
It can scale - I worked in two huge companies dominating the world markets, and we did fine with global support - but they say this is not theirs business model. Well without competition they can do what they want, but customers prefer support and accountability. That's why most countries eventually came up with anti-trust legislation.
>> a higher up at a hospitality company decides to reduce the size of its cleaning staff, because it improves the numbers on a balance sheet somewhere. Later, you are trying to check into a room, but it’s not ready and the clerk can’t tell you when it will be; they can offer a voucher, but what you need is a room.
This reads from the perspective of a person checking in. But it should read from the perspective of the person who made the decision.
The decision was made like this; On most days we have too many cleaners. If we reduce the cleaners we reduce expenses by x.
On some days some customers will need to wait to check-in. Let's move checkin time from 1pm to 2pm (now in some cases to 4pm) to compensate. n% of customers arrive after 4pm anyway. We start cleaning early, so chances are we can accommodate early checkin where necessary.
Where there's no room available before 4pm, some % will complain. Most of those will be placated with a voucher [1] which cost us nothing.
Some small fraction will declare "they'll never use us again". Some will (for reasons) but we'll lose a few.
But the savings outweigh the lost business. Put some of the savings into marketing and sales will go up. Costs remain lower. More profit.
There is perfect accountability of this plan - the board watches to see if profits go up. They don't care about an individual guest with individual problems. The goal of the business is not to "make everyone happy". It's to "make enough people happy" to keep profits.
[1] the existance of the voucher proves this possibility was accounted for.
So accountability in this case is working - except for the customer who didn't get what they want. The customer feels frustrated, so from their perspective there's a failure. But there are other perspectives in play. And they are working as designed.
But we can also look for accountability in the political system. Maybe the hotel should be obliged by the law to pay real money instead of a voucher?
And even in the case where the company's decision is arguably just "bad," it still might not be a problem from the company's point of view.
Companies (including start-ups) create buggy products all the time and don't care, and aren't very responsive to requests for support, as long as money is coming in. I don't think they are using special accountability-flushing techniques. It takes real work, intention, experience, and power in a company to create feedback channels, and use them, and ensure that the customer has an experience of quality. It doesn't happen by magic or by default.
Ideally, a consultant is hired for their specialist skills, rare experience, sage advice on niche topics, etc...
In practice, about half the work I do is to act as a lightning rod so that the guy with the power to sign the cheque for my time doesn't get fired if things go sideways. Instead, they can just blame me, shrug their shoulders, and hire another consultant.
I've had a customer where I got "fired" for an "error". My coworker replaced me. Then he was fired, and I replaced him. We alternated like this for years. Upper management just saw the "bad" consultants get fired for their incompetence, they never noticed that we were the same two guys over and over.
Government and Civil Servant are the biggest example. I guess its time to re-watch "Yes Minister".
The modern company is a very very limited liability company:
- Cut corners so your jets crash and kill people (Boeing)?
- Cheat on emissions testing so your product kill people (VW)?
- Hush up drug trial results so you kills people (Pfizer)?
- Sloppy security leads to hundreds of millions of people's personal data being leaked (too many to mention)?
What happens to those in charge? Nothing. Perhaps they leave with a big golden handshake. If it's really bad, they get a don't do it again agreement with the Feds.
No accountability means no feedback/skin in the game. So nothing gets better.
what you can have is a discussion about this or a blog post that is read by people and maybe some new subscribers, so no worries - all is not lost. :)
When pressed, the Redditor said that the their friend was working on the mathematical theory for computers to control planes that have no power, such as under emergency landing conditions. I.e.: If the engine dies, the auto pilot can help steer the plane onto a runway.
"No, your friend is working on precision glide bombs. The emergency landing thing is just marketing to make it palatable. She might not even know, but that's definitely what she'd doing."
That stuck with me: someone could be working on bomb technology and not even know it.
Talk about an accountability sink!
From Donella Meadows: “Intrinsic responsibility” means that the system is designed to send feedback about the consequences of decision-making directly and quickly and compellingly to the decision-makers.
This could change if technology could solve aggregation and analysis problem, making ready-made decision propositions to management. High risk of this mechanism just becoming another accountability sink, though.
Another solution is to build large organisations out of federated micro-orgs, where such intristic responsibility is feasible.
As organizations become more complex, it's difficult to understand the consequences of many high-level decisions. Unless great effort is made to gather feedback, it won't happen.
Not only that: the lack of immediate, human communication results in one-way feedback mechanisms, like suggestion boxes and surveys. Many companies clearly want to make this work, because we're constantly prompted and sometimes paid to fill out surveys. But the result is survey fatigue.
The person giving feedback needs to be reassured (by people, not machines) that their feedback matters, or they won't be bothered to do it. Often, it's socially awkward to give negative feedback, so people don't. And often, the employees directly on the scene have incentive to encourage customers to avoid negativity when they fill out surveys.
One way to show that feedback matters is to respond to complaints with some sort of assistance. In the example in the article, that's a voucher. Perhaps somewhere in the organization, that voucher counts as a cost, but it's pretty unsatisfying.
In some organizations, managers are encouraged to work at the support desk occasionally as a more immediate way to understand what's going on. (I remember reading about how Craig Newmark would do this for his website.)
As a screen-reader-using person who cannot use pen and paper without assistance, I was once quite enamored by them, but I've changed my stance a bit.
The thing about pen and paper is that it accepts anything you put in, and it's up to a human to validate whether what you put in makes any sense. Computers aren't like that, if they tell you that the numbers in your application have to match up, you need to lie to the government to make them match up, even if you're a weird edge case where the numbers should, in fact, be slightly off and "inconsistent" with each other.
I called the local govt office responsible for this specific program, and they essentially told me to lie to the government in not so many words. Their system is centrally managed, they have no power of introducing updates to it, they wish they could fix it, but even they aren't empowered to do so.
‘An SEP is something we can't see, or don't see, or our brain doesn't let us see, because we think that it's somebody else's problem. That’s what SEP means. Somebody Else’s Problem. The brain just edits it out, it's like a blind spot.
The narration then explains:
The Somebody Else's Problem field... relies on people's natural predisposition not to see anything they don't want to, weren't expecting, or can't explain. If Effrafax had painted the mountain pink and erected a cheap and simple Somebody Else’s Problem field on it, then people would have walked past the mountain, round it, even over it, and simply never have noticed that the thing was there.’
It handles signups, restauration and housing services, grades, everything.
One example is that the grades are entered by professors and mistakes happen all the time, for everyone, due to the insane server load.
There's no one to complain to, because the excuse is always "it's the system, not us"
But I don't think it is quite so black and white in the world. Because the legal system is also a way to give feedback to companies. And it can stop them in their tracks.
Enforcing copyright law through an honest projection of 35mm film footage is a philanthropic endeavour. Making sure that every member of the production team, even the gaffers and stage hands take part in the exclusivity of re-capitalisation efforts, like the Fox complaint, is purely, legalistic sleight of hand.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt11383280/?lang=en&ref_=ext_shr_ln...
The chain breaks when incentives aren’t aligned and there’s a cascade of crap that roles downhill that seem like bad decisions. When, in fact, as the article points out, the decision made didn’t take knock on effects into consideration.
I’ve learned that seemingly poor or even terrible decisions almost always make sense in the context of when and where the decision was made.
- "Sin Eaters"
- Corporations, especially companies that are spun off and take on all the debt of the original company
- Voluntary stool pigeons (in criminal organizations, etc.)
- Certain religious martyrs
Transaction cost economics since the 1960's has been enumerating aspects like these, and showing they in fact determine the shape of business organizations and markets. Exported costs (implied in accountability sink) are mostly the rule rather than the exception.
What to do with them? A primary TCE finding is that if there were no transaction costs to adjudicating liability, it wouldn't matter from the social cost perspective where the liability lay (with the perpetrator or the victim) because they would adjudicate it down to their mitigation costs. As a result, the main policy goal for assigning liability (if you want to minimize the total cost to society) is actually to minimize and correct for adjudication transaction costs. (hence, no-fault divorce and car insurance)
The same dynamics are at play in the market and within organizations.
As a participant if your goal is your own profit, you can gain by making it harder to adjudicate and reducing the benefits thereof (hence binding arbitration, waivers, and lack of effective feedback). Doing so is becoming much simpler as virtual transaction interfaces and remote (even foreign) support afforded by software replace face-to-face interactions bound by social convention.
And who wouldn't want to? If you're head of customer support or developer relations, would you document your bugs or face the wrath of customers for things which can't change fast enough? You'd want to protect yourself and your staff from all the negativity. Indeed, with fixed salaries, your only way of improving your lot is to make your job easier.
To me the solution is to identify when incorporating the feedback actually benefits the participants. There, too, the scalability of virtualized software interfaces can help, e.g., the phone tree that automates simple stuff most people need and vectors complex questions to real people who aren't so harried, or the departing-customer survey querying whether it was price, quality, or service that drove one away.
You have to make accountability profitable.
1. Macro level: Departments claim broad accountability.
2. Micro level: Pinpointing task ownership causes accountability to vanish.
3. Indefinite states: Ambiguous tasks linger without resolution.
4. Entanglement: Dependent tasks inherit this ambiguity.
This creates a system where responsibility exists in superposition, tasks remain unresolved, and accountability becomes increasingly delocalized.
As bottom line at least? Can't have the one without the other, just different aspects of the same shit.
By the way this is what bitcoin was set up to solve...notice it not being solved.