Accountability sinks

Came here to say this.

And even in the case where the company's decision is arguably just "bad," it still might not be a problem from the company's point of view.

Companies (including start-ups) create buggy products all the time and don't care, and aren't very responsive to requests for support, as long as money is coming in. I don't think they are using special accountability-flushing techniques. It takes real work, intention, experience, and power in a company to create feedback channels, and use them, and ensure that the customer has an experience of quality. It doesn't happen by magic or by default.

> you should make yourself unavailable for contact, when you suspect someone is trying to blackmail you.

Maybe I'm missing something, but how often does blackmail happen that it rises to the level of needing strategic advice like "make yourself unavailable" ?

Who is Tom Schelling's audience?

Too focused on the bottom level. If a given business process results in employee A doing their job correctly according to the process, passing work to employee B doing their job correctly according to the process, passing work to employee C doing their job correctly according to the process, and the end result is shit, then the person who is accountable for the end result being shit is the manager who is responsible for the process itself. As more and more employees are involved, and the processes get more and more hierarchical (rather than "employee A", you have "middle-manager M"), then the person with accountability is higher and higher up the hierarchy, who also has more and more power and responsibility to fix it.

The idea of "unaccountable" failures only makes sense if both (a) the problem is so systemic that actually an executive is accountable, (b) the executive is so far removed in the hierarchy from the line employees doing the work that nobody knows each other or sometimes even sits on the same campus, (c) the levers available to the executive to fix the problem are insufficient for fixing the problem, e.g. the underlying root cause is a culture problem, but culture is determined by who you hire, fire, and promote, while hiring and firing are handled by "outside" HR who are unaccountable to the executive who is supposedly accountable. But really this is another way of saying that accountability is simply another level higher, i.e. it is the CEO who is accountable since both the executive and HR are accountable to the CEO.

No, you have to have an astoundingly large organization (like government) to really have unaccountability sinks, where Congress pass laws with explicit intent for some desired outcome, but after passing through 14 committees and working groups the real-language policy has been distorted to produce the exact opposite effect, like a great big game of telephone, one defined by everyone trying to de-risk, because the only genuine shared culture across large organizations is de-risking, and it is simply not possible to actually put in place both policy and real-life changes to hiring, firing, and promotion practices in the public sector to start to take more risks, because at the end of the day, even the politicians in Congress are trying to de-risk, and civil servants burning taxpayer money on riskier schemes is not politically popular, though maybe it should be, considering the costs of de-risked culture.

The point is that "accountability of an algorithm" is a category error.

> Too focused on the bottom level. If a given business process results in employee A doing their job correctly according to the process... then the person who is accountable for the end result being shit is the manager who is responsible for the process itself.

The book's point is that while this _should_ be the case, all too often it's not. AFAIK, nobody has been charged with forging documents in the case of Wells Fargo cross selling. Not the counter clerks who directly responded to incentives and management pressure nor the executives who built that system.