Chapter 6. Accountability

If the last two chapters felt like a power-to-the-teams manifesto, then this and the next chapter provide the balancing act. Accountability helps people use their autonomy judiciously. Clear accountability helps clarify decision rights and input rights. It helps avoid decision stalemates and improves responsiveness—one of the three key themes described in Chapter 3. It helps us learn quickly after failing-fast (Section 2.4.1). Otherwise, we might just keep failing for the same reasons.

We’ll see how to clarify accountability, how power struggles may result from a suboptimal assignment of authority and accountability, how to drive accountability not only for results but also for the decisions along the way, and how to ...

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