Beyond Agile (5/52): Weaponized Accountability and its impact on Creativity
Or how Apple leverages trust-driven accountability to spur creativity to make and win on big creative bets.
One of the prime directives of any TPM organization is clarifying and increasing accountability.
Who is driving this project end to end?
This particular engineering design doc, who is responsible for writing this?
Our PRs are taking longer to review, anyone wants to own taking initiative on fixing this?
Who is putting together plan for this work?
Who is lead the charge on this blocker field issue?
Now, that scares many people, particularly engineering. Why?
For many the word increased accountability means more eyes from leadership, more interference, more performance evaluations, just more paperwork, and risk to ones employment.
In a recent chat with an engineering colleague, they said some things that really put a new perspective on this for me.
Increased accountability means less risk-taking from engineering.
We can dig into this further:
What does risk-taking mean? Risk-taking means less creativity.
Does it necessarily mean that creativity always involves risk-taking? Not necessarily, but it can be especially true if an engineering team wants to use a brand new technology or tool that either has never used before or hasn’t seen adoption at scale in the industry just yet.
So, risk-taking and creativity is about making bets on new technologies? Yes, but not all bets have to be new technologies. It is about the engineering teams having the freedom to choose the right path based on their experience without having to be scrutinized or get approval for everything thing.
So, accountability denies engineers the freedom to make risky creative bets without the fear of failure? Almost. It isn’t about fear of failure, but the consequence of failure. In many cases, when the visibility is so high on you, stage fright or fear of failing will push you towards making decisions that are “safe” which can also prevent the right technology choices for a project.
What does “safe” mean in this context? Safe is about not going for the big bets that can have outsized returns. You only want to push small incremental changes after immense scrutiny.
So, accountability prevents engineers the freedom to make big risky creative bets that can have outside returns? Yes, because leadership will always want to be involved and hold people accountable for failures and just not trust the teams working on the project.
There it is. Trust.
When accountability is weaponized, the way it can be done by leadership, both knowingly and unknowingly, we evaporate trust from the environment preventing creative big bets.
I have seen how accountability gets weaponized.
Big bets, creativity risks, the possibility of failure or complexity in any project has a non-zero chance of happening. Plans will change, things will require iteration and time, and patience.
I have seen leadership leverage its bully pulpit (aka exec, leadership, steer committee, etc meetings) to chastise engineer leads, TPMs, teams.
Your convergence rate is low. Why are you not working faster?
Why is this not working? Who owns this implementation?
What didn’t you raise this issue earlier? Who is responsible for this piece of the project?
How can you implement this without talking to the leadership team first?
That engineer manager is always looking for shortcuts and hacks so no wonder this failed.
I want more weekly status reports and names against actions items and projects.
Weaponized accountability will indeed negatively impact an engineering organizations creativity because failure or failing on a bet is not seen as a lesson learned opportunity but failure for which people must be held responsible for.
This is the biggest reason why any agile implementation or even waterfall will fail.
Let me flip the conversation:
What if Accountability is actually a tool for fostering more trust, not less, and can enable more creativity: trust-driven accountability.
This was especially true at Apple where the concept of DRI (Directly Responsible Individual) was one of accountability and trust. Everything we did, action items, projects, docs, process, everything had to have a DRI - accountability.
At Apple, the DRI was a tool to enable decentralized decision making. Instead of weaponized accountability it is about trust-driven accountability.
Now, here is how trust-driven accountability increases creativity.
In order for creativity to flourish, trust from leadership must be high and part of the leader-team contract. When leadership has trust in the teams to get the job done, teams will automatically gravitate towards big creative bets. With each successful release, their confidence and creativity will flourish.
Accountability, when implemented with trust, is about signaling to the organization that leadership or the cross-functional group believes in the capabilities or skills of the person to get the job done. There is no confusion about whether something is owned by someone, tasks don’t suffer in the “unassigned” limbo, lack of fear will allow people to take more ownership and less finger pointing when things fall through the crack and cause issues later.
Now - you can’t just put a name against a task and call them DRI and be done with it.
In a trust driven accountability model, leadership recognizes that not all decisions can be made by higher ups all the time. In order to ship things at a more rapid pace, leadership must place trust in the teams to make certain decisions closer to the work without needing or seeking approval. What matters is the end goal. By elevating and clarifying the accountable people, leadership is signaling their trust in the experts to lead.
When there is trust driven accountability in an organization, teams have freedom to make creativity and risky bets without fear of failing where failure is a lesson learning opportunity.
When TPMs strive for better clarity around accountability, we must always put this context at the forefront if engineering teams are worried about stifling of creativity.
This line of thinking can be extrapolated into what is known as psychological safety. That is perhaps an essay for another newsletter.
Until next-time! 👋
-Aadil
Further Reading:
HBR: How Apple Is Organized For Innovation - This is really great insightful look into how Apple’s org design has evolved since Steve Job’s second tenure in the late 90s. You will see how trust and accountability is a big part of it.
Gitlab - Directly Responsible Individuals - Outside of Apple, this is perhaps the best explanation of what a DRI is.
HBR: Do you really trust your team & do they trust you? - This HBR article has been on my bookmarks. Trust requires many things and here some great suggestions on how you can build trust in your organization.
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