After an event, “Who is accountable?” can be a fair question. It becomes less useful when it is answered before we understand the work. A person’s action is visible; the conditions surrounding that action often need to be uncovered.
Ask what shaped the decision
What was the person trying to accomplish? What information and tools were available? Were there competing demands, unclear handoffs, or a control that looked workable on paper but failed in practice? These questions do not excuse every decision. They make a judgment better informed. Human and Organizational Performance (HOP) asks leaders to examine how people and systems interact. A useful standard is to learn before assigning responsibility and to examine organizational decisions alongside individual ones.
Accountability has more than one owner
Workers have responsibilities to colleagues and to the work. Leaders have responsibilities for the resources, priorities, procedures, and controls they create and maintain. An organization should be willing to examine both. It should also distinguish a mistake, a reasonable adaptation under pressure, and deliberate harmful conduct rather than flattening them into one category.
- Check the evidence before reaching a conclusion about intent.
- Ask whether the expected action was possible under the actual conditions.
- Identify who can change the conditions that repeatedly produce the same difficulty.
- Set an owner and a way to check whether the response improved the work.
Fairness requires clear expectations and consistent decisions. It also requires care with language: “human error” can name an observation, but it does not explain why a system allowed the event or what will prevent a recurrence.
Close the loop
When workers contribute an account of the work, tell them what was learned, what will change, and what could not be changed yet. Check the result with them. Accountability becomes credible when the organization follows through on its own commitments as carefully as it examines individual actions.
Adapted and edited from Todd’s 2024 article archive. ← All articles
Sources and further reading
These primary sources support the background concepts. The author’s examples and interpretations are identified in the article; links do not imply agency endorsement.
- U.S. Department of Energy: Human Performance Improvement Handbook (DOE-HDBK-1028-2009)Background on individual, leader and organizational influences on performance; not a universal HOP standard.
- OSHA: Worker ParticipationInvolving workers in identifying concerns and developing improvements.