the plurality of accountability (sinks)

taking the parallax view

It seems that if you’re concerned that a subject doesn’t seem to have been addressed at all in the literature, no matter how hard you look, the best thing to do is write about it yourself, at which point the literature will start throwing itself at you as soon as it’s too late to do anything about it. As well as “The Blame Game” by Christopher Hood, my local charity shop recently disgorged a copy of “Understanding Policy Fiascoes” by Mark Bovens and Paul T’Hart. I think I’d have … not necessarily thought differently about accountability sinks if I’d read them, but seen them in more context.

Boven and T’Hart have a really interesting example in one of their chapters, on the difficulty of establishing causality in analysing a disaster ex post. The idea is that decisions are taken in an institutional context, and that your assignment of responsibility is going to be greatly influenced by the level of abstraction at which you carry out your analysis. (And therefore, that the level at which you carry out the analysis is going to be greatly influenced by who you want to find responsible).

So, we might take the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. This was, of course, caused by the decision on the part of engineers at Morton Thiokol to ignore warnings about the fragility of the rubber O-rings on the rocket boosters to low temperatures.

Or, it was caused by poor communication of risks and a lack of exchange between Thiokol and NASA, so that the risk information was not able to inform the decision to proceed with the launch.

Or, it was caused by the shift in policy at NASA away from the safety-first principle of aborting a launch if there were any concerns, to one in which launches would proceed unless specific danger could be identified.

Or, it was caused by the overall context of space policy which left NASA competing for budget with Star Wars and excessively incentivised to keep a strong launch schedule for commercial and PR reasons.

Which is true? There’s no answer to that question except to say that the plurality of perspectives is necessary; all these things can be simultaneously true without contradicting each other. If you want an answer to the question “but who’s really to blame?” then tough luck; the universe isn’t obliged to provide you with one. I think what’s going on here is something like the conclusion I reach in the last chapter of The Unaccountability Machine - that although some accountability sinks are intentionally created as a self-protection tactic for managers, some of them are just manifestations of the fact that when decision making is industrialised at scale, the ordinary language concept of accountability starts getting genuinely difficult to apply, because it’s not possible to have the same sort of relationship with a system that it’s possible to have with a human being.

They also note that even the understanding of whether something is a fiasco or not might not be wholly fixed; although nobody is ever going to rehabilitate the Challenger launch, it’s notable that in earlier books about “Planning Disasters” used the Sydney Opera House as one of the canonical examples. The building of Charles de Gaulle Airport has actually changed sides in the literature; in books from the 1960s it’s a success story to be contrasted with the British failure to agree on a third London airport but in books from the 1980s it’s a cautionary tale of badly misestimating the demand for air travel and the capacity of existing airports.

Anyway, happy Friday everyone. I thought this article on accountability sinks in Star Trek was fun.