In the hiring example, perhaps the person A stops being accountable for hiring someone successful in the role, and rather they are accountable for successfully hiring persons B who is capable of hiring someone to fill the role.

Essentially creating an accountability chain. If you want to describe a logical chain of accountability instead as a “accountability sink”, then I’d go along with that.

It’s true that accountability chains can be difficult to keep track of and the longer they get, the blurrier they get.

The comments here are grossly oversimplifying this concept.

https://managementpatterns.blogspot.com/2013/01/pattern-shit...

I learned early on when I moved from development to management that a big part of my job was being accountable for everything my team did (short of outright sabotage). You don't hold junior devs accountable for anything, you do your best to monitor their work anytime they're working on something mission critical and to mentor them through the mistakes they make. Senior devs take on some or a lot of that monitoring and mentoring role, especially as the team size grows, but as their manager I am still accountable for any errors they make too (especially including letting errors from junior devs slip through).

Sometimes I think the most important part of my job is standing up before senior management and saying something like "My team made this series of decisions which resulted in the bad outcome we are here to discuss. I apologise and accept full responsibility. The team has learned from this, and we can assure you we will never repeat this mistake." And then deflecting and outright refusing to throw any of my team under the bus by naming them - to the point of being accused of insubordination occasionally.

(To be honest, I didn't internalise that quite early enough. There are probably a few apologies I should have made from back then...)