Designed Unaccountability: Why Your Organization Rewards Powerlessness

Dr. Leandro Herrero:

Some organizations are purposefully designed for their people to be successfully unaccountable. The system will defend itself against the threat of ‘skin in the game’. Turkeys don’t like Christmas.

Imagine this scenario. You’re at the airline desk to check in, and you’re told: “Sorry, Sir, I’m afraid we’re overbooked.” “How come?” you ask. “Here’s my ticket.” “I can see that, Sir,” says the matter-of-fact person on the other side of the desk. “But don’t worry, you’ll be offered an alternative flight.”

Your adrenaline is already high, and it spikes when he adds, “for tomorrow.” Anger, rage, calming down, more anger — until you realize that you’re talking to somebody who has zero power to change things. ‘The system’ already includes the possibility of you being thrown out. That’s what ‘overbooking’ means. Did you not get the memo?

Let’s assume you go to Customer Services. They can’t do anything about it either. They feel very sorry for you, look sad, but they don’t make the rules. It’s ‘The System’. You’re talking to powerless people again.

In the unlikely event that you obtained the CEO’s phone number, he’d probably say that he’s very sorry, but he himself doesn’t make the rules. There’s a bunch of people who work out processes, systems, and standard operating procedures — and he wouldn’t dare bypass them.

No single human, you discover, has any power that can be put to use. That’s why ‘The System’ works. It’s successful.

This scenario is described in Dan Davies’ ‘The Unaccountability Machine’ (2024), and it’s a prototype for multiple variations of the same: nobody has skin in the game.

The importance of this goes beyond the obvious. It’s not just that there’s no accountability around, it’s that ‘The System’ functions precisely because of that. The system is purposefully designed for no accountability. If everybody in this tale were accountable, or behaved as such, the system would collapse. People would have to react, do something, solve the problem here and now. Wow. Unsustainable.

There are millions of ‘systems’ purposefully designed to lack accountability. You thought unaccountability was bad, have preached that a hundred times, attended hundreds of corporate meetings lamenting the problem. Oh, wait, ‘accountability’ is one of your key values on the posters on the wall. But the system works not ‘despite’ the lack of accountability, but ‘because’ of it.

Legions of unaccountable people hold non-jobs in organizations. They go from meeting to meeting, pontificating about this and that, but nothing ever happens. They have no skin in the game. All they have is a paycheck at the end of the month. You can spot them easily: always arriving late (“Sorry, I’m late, I had another meeting”) and leaving early (“Sorry, I have to go to another meeting”). Their participation between “sorry I’m late” and “sorry I have to go” is grotesquely irrelevant, but they always get a compassionate collective nod and a smile.

Moons ago, I visited Russia when it was still the Soviet state. In the beautiful Hermitage Museum, I tried to buy a book. I remember a corner of the room displaying many of them behind a small desk manned by a young woman. The books were inside a glass cupboard. When I asked for one, the lady told us, in her poor English but clear enough, that she didn’t have the key to the cupboard so, sadly, she couldn’t help. We asked whether, if we came back the next day (something planned for the group), she could then sell it to us. She said she still wouldn’t have the key. In fact, she had been at that desk every day for the past year and had never had the key.

More recently, I spent a few days in Varadero, Cuba, staying in a beautiful resort that seemed to have one single espresso machine for the entire country. I asked the bar attendant where I could buy a Cuban cigar. She looked at me and explained, in Spanish this time which helped, that I would have to go to town. I was surprised; I’d imagined Cuban cigars would be hanging from the trees. But she was adamant: not here in this resort.

Resigned, I went around the building in search of the toilets. Just before them I saw a large shop at the back of the bar selling all types of cigars. A few metres away, in the same building. Like everywhere there, the shop staff made every possible effort to show complete lack of interest in whether we bought anything, let alone in our comment that we’d been told to go to town. No comment. No smile. They belonged to that vast category: “I don’t really want to be here.”

These communist absurdities are an easy target for conversation. But on a smaller scale, lack of accountability is everywhere — it has nothing to do with communism. They just perfected it.

The opposite, of course, is ‘skin in the game’, as Nassim Taleb so elegantly put it. I must confess that, these days, when I see it, I get into such a celebratory, exultant mood it feels like discovering a new world. The corner shop run by that fellow, the restaurant managed by two partners — people whose livelihood is earned every day. There are plenty of models in between, but I’ve reached a rudimentary, black-and-white discrimination: do they (the group, the leaders) have skin in the game?

Confronted with a system (a culture, company, organization) that works on the basis of unaccountability by design, one has choices — some effective, others not. Fighting individuals is a waste of time and a blood-pressure risk. Trying to change the system? Ditto. If you’re from outside, navigate it. If you’re inside but recognise the problem, you’ll need alliances and a complex culture-change plan. If you’re on the side of ‘too much’ skin in the game, there will be days when you feel desperate — perhaps jealous — but you may be freer than you think.

Freedom, it turns out, can be very lonely. The unaccountable sleep well; the accountable stay awake — and keep the lights on. Maybe the real luxury today is simply having skin in the game. Accountability: scarce, risky, and, these days, almost revolutionary. Those with skin in the game still build things. The rest just attend meetings.

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Dr Leandro Herrero – Chief Organizational Architect at The Chalfont Project, Author, International Speaker and Psychiatrist. For the past 25 years, Dr Herrero and his team have been transforming culture in organizations via his pioneering Viral Change™ methodology. Follow Dr Herrero on LinkedIn for all the latest updates.

Written by: Editor