5 ms·

Bi-directional accountability: A leadership shift most organizations avoid

65 points by todsacerdoti 1y ago

recursivedoubts 1y ago
“They constantly try to escape From the darkness outside and within By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good. But the man that is will shadow The man that pretends to be.”
soVeryTired 1y ago
I have to say, I don't really understand this. Can anyone shed some light?
- nobodyandproud 1y ago
  What don’t you understand?
  - quag 1y ago
    Ok, I'll bite. From the article I can't really figure out what collaborating by contract (CBC) is, how it works in practice or how to introduce it to an organization. A search in Google for "Collaborate by contract" gives three results, all from the same person, all in the last few weeks. Including this new article it's 1776 words in total on CBC. It doesn't seem to be real or something that has been tried out in an organization. It appears to be Al Newkirk's idea for a system that could work, but has not been tried. Specifically, I'd like to see an example of a contract and who agrees to it; what the journal of contracts looks like; what happens when after an agreement everyone learns something that they didn't know when the agreements were made; what are the leaders committing to and what happens when they fail to deliver that? Links found on CBC: https://www.alnewkirk.com/bidirectional-accountability/ https://www.alnewkirk.com/bidirectional-accountability/ https://www.alnewkirk.com/understanding-collaborate-by-contract/ https://www.alnewkirk.com/understanding-collaborate-by-contr... https://www.alnewkirk.com/maybe-its-time-to-change-the-way-we-work/ https://www.alnewkirk.com/maybe-its-time-to-change-the-way-w... https://www.reddit.com/r/productivity/comments/1n04s5z/comment/naxg5h6/ https://www.reddit.com/r/productivity/comments/1n04s5z/comme...
    - nobodyandproud 1y ago
      Okay, I can work with this. Many teams have working agreements; and companies have employee handbooks. I don’t know if you ever read these in detail, but they’re generally in one direction. Other than dating/relationships (manager and direct reports, etc) and some generally applicable guidelines, it’s favorable to management. One thing I make very clear to my direct reports is that I expect them to hold me to account when I fail to do something or hinder the team; even going above me if needed. But this is ad-hoc. It’s not consistent across the board, and I see managers who are active hindrances to their team or their mission. This is also the norm in many companies, and it’s a problem.
- alnewkirkcom 1y ago
  "Collaborate by Contract" (CBC) is my framework; it's new, and I'm publishing it piece by piece. It's not an "industry standard" yet, but it's more than theory: it's how I've learned to get execution discipline in teams where vague goals and shifting priorities are the default. It doesn't need to be practiced by the entire org; as with any other type of agreement, you just need two willing participants. At the simplest level: A CBC agreement is a short written contract between leaders and reports. Ideally, person to person, but leader and team is fine too. It defines the objective, deliverables, dependencies, expectations, and outcomes (i.e., success criteria). Work doesn't start until all parties agree. A journal of contracts is just the running log of those agreements. Think of it as the team/dept/org's public ledger, what was agreed, by whom, when, and why, and ideally the artifact captures the negotiations and tradeoffs made to arrive at the final agreement. Patterns show up quickly (who delivers, who misses, where scope creep hides). This makes performance reviews objective and enables meritocracy. Okay, things change, and sometimes new info emerges: agreements aren't stone tablets. So, agreements might include predefined checkpoints or "if/then" clauses. Instead of pretending we never change, CBC forces us to renegotiate in daylight, with both sides explicit about the cost of changing. What leaders commit to: clarity, timely decisions, and removing dependencies. If a leader misses their side, say they don't secure the promised resource or they blow their own deadline, that's a contract miss just like an IC failing to deliver code. Also, by signing the agreement, the leader is sayin,g "I agree with this plan/strategy." In CBC, credibility runs both ways. It's early, and I'm still publishing examples and tooling. But the premise is simple: if you can't write it down, negotiate it, and sign it, it's not really a commitment, it's just vibes. Also, no, it's not Waterfall, because it's more about documenting "expectations" and "outcomes" than about specifying particular work activities. cc quag
  - quag 1y ago
    Thank you for the description of CBC. I'm curious about it and your thinking on how to track things over time and see what has surprised us since we got started. It is useful to note down every time you (or your team) sets an expectation with someone (or another team) and then make sure you don't forget about that. It's also useful to be deliberate when setting expectations. Having a public journal could well work for noting down when expectations are set and whenever there is a meeting of minds. I've found when tracking things like this that the amount of data can quickly grow to the point where you can no longer quickly and easily reason about it. The success seems to live and die on the data visualization or UI/UX.
alphazard 1y ago
If I had to pin down a singular reason why leadership is almost universally weak across the industry, it would be that everyone prefers to avoid accountability, and no one is willing to bet on their own decision making. The master algorithm for cultivating strong leadership is just Bayes' rule. If an employee makes good decisions they should have more influence over the organization's resources. If they make bad decisions they should have less influence over the organization's resources. Influence maps to probability. Most organizations aren't setup to do this well. There is no where for bad leaders to go if they can't also contribute directly, and there is a reluctance to demote people or reduce their influence. A reluctance to demote has to be paired with a reluctance to promote. Consistently making good decisions is likely to be recognized artificially slowly, to prevent wage increases.
- scrubs 1y ago
  Agree. I have repeatedly said one mangement fundamental is control is commensurate to accountability. Thereafter, what you write deals with increasing control or decreasing depending on outcomes. I also agree with point about canning or demoting senior staff. My better half had to deal with a complete jerk senior manager. It took an act of God to make the organization hold that clown accountable. In the end his team was downsized, but I'm not sure if he ever lost his title. Why? Senior managers + HR are serious believers in the unitary theory of the executive. As I say it takes an act of God to make them see what they did is not right by definition.
- michaelt 1y ago
  I suspect the industry's culture of job-hopping doesn't help accountability either. Facebook kicked off a bunch of 'metaverse' projects in 2020 (even literally renaming the company) and 5 years later, if their employee tenures average 2.5 years, their workforce will have turned over twice. Can't expect someone to be "accountable" for promises made by their predecessor's predecessor.
  - alnewkirkcom 1y ago
    In a post-CBC world, the successor would be asked to renegotiate the predecessor's open/pending agreements or propose replacements.
jiggawatts 1y ago
Yeah, this ain’t happening. The problem described is the symptom, not the cause. Trying to fix symptoms is futile, especially if one doesn’t even acknowledge the cause. The cause is power asymmetry. The symptom is unaccountability of management to those they are managing. Power asymmetry has some partial fixes, but the article mentions none of those and instead naively wishes that the consequences of concentrated power can be magically contracted away. Who’s going to enforce the contract? I.e.: Who’s going to arrest the King?
- nine_k 1y ago
  Historically there is a large number of cases of kings being arrested and sometimes even held accountable. A king is not immune, because he cannot easily fire his subjects, or get hired to a king's position in another kingdom. A CEO is in an easier situation, comparatively.
  - jiggawatts 1y ago
    Arrested by the nobles in most such cases. I’ve never heard of the equivalent of a “popular uprising” or a “people’s revolution” ever occurring within a private enterprise. The law in western countries simply doesn’t allow for it — the hierarchy is entrenched in several parallel systems such as the police, judiciary, securities registrars, etc… In practice 99% of large enterprise employees must “do as they’re told” and their only available alternative option is to quit. I’ve never heard of any org where there is any kind of bottom-to-top accountability and if such a thing was promised I would be immediately suspicious that it’s just a gimmick intended to even further exploit the naive.
    - bigbadfeline 1y ago
      > In practice 99% of large enterprise employees must “do as they’re told” and their only available alternative option is to quit. I don't see this as a bug, it's a forced feature of a program that needs some other parts fixed. The problem isn't local to any organization, it's lack of functional competition and that's due to systemic reasons which are beyond the reach of CBC, bottom-up or internal anything.
pmontra 1y ago
Maybe this page of the same site is better at explaining what it is all about https://www.alnewkirk.com/understanding-collaborate-by-contract/ https://www.alnewkirk.com/understanding-collaborate-by-contr...
sksxihve 1y ago
Predictably, pushback takes familiar forms. This will slow us down really means “I don’t want to be pinned down.” We need to trust each other, not sign contracts is code for “I prefer commitments I can’t be held to.” This feels like we’re inviting conflict is a fear of exposing leadership weaknesses. We can’t document everything often means “I don’t want a paper trail.” And leaders need room to maneuver is a desire to pivot without owning the cost of disruption. This hits the nail on the head, I've heard all those excuses almost verbatim from upper management when proposing changes and I've countered all those objections with the answers given in the paragraph that follows. The current C-Suite thinks RTO is going to fix all the company problems and I'm out of ideas on how to effect meaningful change. My team is fantastic but interfacing with other directors/execs is a nightmare. Do any of you that have gone through this have any advice, short of finding a new job?
alnewkirkcom 1y ago
Most orgs don’t actually have (or want) accountability symmetry because they’d have to give up the comfort of ambiguity. There's rarely a mechanism to audit past decisions, objectively assess people or projects, or enforce meritocracy. Performance reviews (for people and projects) are usually narrative-driven theater: selective memory, flattery, politics and spin, and a lot of “effort counts” rationalizations. Almost no one asks the simple questions (of a person or a project): Did what we expected to happen, actually happen? If not, what went wrong? That’s what led to Collaborate by Contract (CBC). A desire to create a hierarchical map of decisions and commitments, and to force the hard questions and clarity upfront, and leave a record behind. Everyone in the org should be able to answer, at any moment: What are we doing, and why, and how, and with whom. Ideally, everyone in the org should be able to point to some artifact that can answer those questions. Without that agreement, you’re not managing execution, you’re managing stories (i.e., it's just theater IMHO).

65 points by todsacerdoti 1y ago

“They constantly try to escape From the darkness outside and within By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good. But the man that is will shadow The man that pretends to be.”

soVeryTired 1y ago

I have to say, I don't really understand this. Can anyone shed some light?

nobodyandproud 1y ago
What don’t you understand?
- quag 1y ago
  Ok, I'll bite. From the article I can't really figure out what collaborating by contract (CBC) is, how it works in practice or how to introduce it to an organization. A search in Google for "Collaborate by contract" gives three results, all from the same person, all in the last few weeks. Including this new article it's 1776 words in total on CBC. It doesn't seem to be real or something that has been tried out in an organization. It appears to be Al Newkirk's idea for a system that could work, but has not been tried. Specifically, I'd like to see an example of a contract and who agrees to it; what the journal of contracts looks like; what happens when after an agreement everyone learns something that they didn't know when the agreements were made; what are the leaders committing to and what happens when they fail to deliver that? Links found on CBC: https://www.alnewkirk.com/bidirectional-accountability/ https://www.alnewkirk.com/bidirectional-accountability/ https://www.alnewkirk.com/understanding-collaborate-by-contract/ https://www.alnewkirk.com/understanding-collaborate-by-contr... https://www.alnewkirk.com/maybe-its-time-to-change-the-way-we-work/ https://www.alnewkirk.com/maybe-its-time-to-change-the-way-w... https://www.reddit.com/r/productivity/comments/1n04s5z/comment/naxg5h6/ https://www.reddit.com/r/productivity/comments/1n04s5z/comme...
  - nobodyandproud 1y ago
    Okay, I can work with this. Many teams have working agreements; and companies have employee handbooks. I don’t know if you ever read these in detail, but they’re generally in one direction. Other than dating/relationships (manager and direct reports, etc) and some generally applicable guidelines, it’s favorable to management. One thing I make very clear to my direct reports is that I expect them to hold me to account when I fail to do something or hinder the team; even going above me if needed. But this is ad-hoc. It’s not consistent across the board, and I see managers who are active hindrances to their team or their mission. This is also the norm in many companies, and it’s a problem.
alnewkirkcom 1y ago
"Collaborate by Contract" (CBC) is my framework; it's new, and I'm publishing it piece by piece. It's not an "industry standard" yet, but it's more than theory: it's how I've learned to get execution discipline in teams where vague goals and shifting priorities are the default. It doesn't need to be practiced by the entire org; as with any other type of agreement, you just need two willing participants. At the simplest level: A CBC agreement is a short written contract between leaders and reports. Ideally, person to person, but leader and team is fine too. It defines the objective, deliverables, dependencies, expectations, and outcomes (i.e., success criteria). Work doesn't start until all parties agree. A journal of contracts is just the running log of those agreements. Think of it as the team/dept/org's public ledger, what was agreed, by whom, when, and why, and ideally the artifact captures the negotiations and tradeoffs made to arrive at the final agreement. Patterns show up quickly (who delivers, who misses, where scope creep hides). This makes performance reviews objective and enables meritocracy. Okay, things change, and sometimes new info emerges: agreements aren't stone tablets. So, agreements might include predefined checkpoints or "if/then" clauses. Instead of pretending we never change, CBC forces us to renegotiate in daylight, with both sides explicit about the cost of changing. What leaders commit to: clarity, timely decisions, and removing dependencies. If a leader misses their side, say they don't secure the promised resource or they blow their own deadline, that's a contract miss just like an IC failing to deliver code. Also, by signing the agreement, the leader is sayin,g "I agree with this plan/strategy." In CBC, credibility runs both ways. It's early, and I'm still publishing examples and tooling. But the premise is simple: if you can't write it down, negotiate it, and sign it, it's not really a commitment, it's just vibes. Also, no, it's not Waterfall, because it's more about documenting "expectations" and "outcomes" than about specifying particular work activities. cc quag
- quag 1y ago
  Thank you for the description of CBC. I'm curious about it and your thinking on how to track things over time and see what has surprised us since we got started. It is useful to note down every time you (or your team) sets an expectation with someone (or another team) and then make sure you don't forget about that. It's also useful to be deliberate when setting expectations. Having a public journal could well work for noting down when expectations are set and whenever there is a meeting of minds. I've found when tracking things like this that the amount of data can quickly grow to the point where you can no longer quickly and easily reason about it. The success seems to live and die on the data visualization or UI/UX.

alphazard 1y ago

If I had to pin down a singular reason why leadership is almost universally weak across the industry, it would be that everyone prefers to avoid accountability, and no one is willing to bet on their own decision making. The master algorithm for cultivating strong leadership is just Bayes' rule. If an employee makes good decisions they should have more influence over the organization's resources. If they make bad decisions they should have less influence over the organization's resources. Influence maps to probability. Most organizations aren't setup to do this well. There is no where for bad leaders to go if they can't also contribute directly, and there is a reluctance to demote people or reduce their influence. A reluctance to demote has to be paired with a reluctance to promote. Consistently making good decisions is likely to be recognized artificially slowly, to prevent wage increases.

scrubs 1y ago
Agree. I have repeatedly said one mangement fundamental is control is commensurate to accountability. Thereafter, what you write deals with increasing control or decreasing depending on outcomes. I also agree with point about canning or demoting senior staff. My better half had to deal with a complete jerk senior manager. It took an act of God to make the organization hold that clown accountable. In the end his team was downsized, but I'm not sure if he ever lost his title. Why? Senior managers + HR are serious believers in the unitary theory of the executive. As I say it takes an act of God to make them see what they did is not right by definition.
michaelt 1y ago
I suspect the industry's culture of job-hopping doesn't help accountability either. Facebook kicked off a bunch of 'metaverse' projects in 2020 (even literally renaming the company) and 5 years later, if their employee tenures average 2.5 years, their workforce will have turned over twice. Can't expect someone to be "accountable" for promises made by their predecessor's predecessor.
- alnewkirkcom 1y ago
  In a post-CBC world, the successor would be asked to renegotiate the predecessor's open/pending agreements or propose replacements.

jiggawatts 1y ago

Yeah, this ain’t happening. The problem described is the symptom, not the cause. Trying to fix symptoms is futile, especially if one doesn’t even acknowledge the cause. The cause is power asymmetry. The symptom is unaccountability of management to those they are managing. Power asymmetry has some partial fixes, but the article mentions none of those and instead naively wishes that the consequences of concentrated power can be magically contracted away. Who’s going to enforce the contract? I.e.: Who’s going to arrest the King?

nine_k 1y ago
Historically there is a large number of cases of kings being arrested and sometimes even held accountable. A king is not immune, because he cannot easily fire his subjects, or get hired to a king's position in another kingdom. A CEO is in an easier situation, comparatively.
- jiggawatts 1y ago
  Arrested by the nobles in most such cases. I’ve never heard of the equivalent of a “popular uprising” or a “people’s revolution” ever occurring within a private enterprise. The law in western countries simply doesn’t allow for it — the hierarchy is entrenched in several parallel systems such as the police, judiciary, securities registrars, etc… In practice 99% of large enterprise employees must “do as they’re told” and their only available alternative option is to quit. I’ve never heard of any org where there is any kind of bottom-to-top accountability and if such a thing was promised I would be immediately suspicious that it’s just a gimmick intended to even further exploit the naive.
  - bigbadfeline 1y ago
    > In practice 99% of large enterprise employees must “do as they’re told” and their only available alternative option is to quit. I don't see this as a bug, it's a forced feature of a program that needs some other parts fixed. The problem isn't local to any organization, it's lack of functional competition and that's due to systemic reasons which are beyond the reach of CBC, bottom-up or internal anything.

pmontra 1y ago

Maybe this page of the same site is better at explaining what it is all about https://www.alnewkirk.com/understanding-collaborate-by-contract/ https://www.alnewkirk.com/understanding-collaborate-by-contr...

sksxihve 1y ago

Predictably, pushback takes familiar forms. This will slow us down really means “I don’t want to be pinned down.” We need to trust each other, not sign contracts is code for “I prefer commitments I can’t be held to.” This feels like we’re inviting conflict is a fear of exposing leadership weaknesses. We can’t document everything often means “I don’t want a paper trail.” And leaders need room to maneuver is a desire to pivot without owning the cost of disruption. This hits the nail on the head, I've heard all those excuses almost verbatim from upper management when proposing changes and I've countered all those objections with the answers given in the paragraph that follows. The current C-Suite thinks RTO is going to fix all the company problems and I'm out of ideas on how to effect meaningful change. My team is fantastic but interfacing with other directors/execs is a nightmare. Do any of you that have gone through this have any advice, short of finding a new job?

alnewkirkcom 1y ago

Most orgs don’t actually have (or want) accountability symmetry because they’d have to give up the comfort of ambiguity. There's rarely a mechanism to audit past decisions, objectively assess people or projects, or enforce meritocracy. Performance reviews (for people and projects) are usually narrative-driven theater: selective memory, flattery, politics and spin, and a lot of “effort counts” rationalizations. Almost no one asks the simple questions (of a person or a project): Did what we expected to happen, actually happen? If not, what went wrong? That’s what led to Collaborate by Contract (CBC). A desire to create a hierarchical map of decisions and commitments, and to force the hard questions and clarity upfront, and leave a record behind. Everyone in the org should be able to answer, at any moment: What are we doing, and why, and how, and with whom. Ideally, everyone in the org should be able to point to some artifact that can answer those questions. Without that agreement, you’re not managing execution, you’re managing stories (i.e., it's just theater IMHO).