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Responsibility

The terms accountability and responsibility are closely related but differ in focus and scope. Responsibility refers to the specific tasks or duties that a person or group is expected to perform. It is about the actions required to fulfil a role or obligation and can often be shared among several individuals. 

In contrast, accountability is about being answerable for the outcomes of those tasks. It involves ownership and the willingness to explain or justify results, whether they are successful or not. While responsibility focuses on completing tasks, accountability focuses on the results and typically lies with an individual, even if multiple people share the responsibility. 

To illustrate, a team may share the responsibility for completing a project, but the project manager is accountable for its overall success or failure. Responsibility is tied to doing, while accountability is tied to owning the results. Both concepts are essential, especially in organisational settings, to ensure clarity and effectiveness. 

An effective organisation ensures that both concepts are clearly defined and aligned.

It is also important to remember moral luck and its potential role in any kind of decision. In the military world, the difference between a medal and a court martial can be wafer thin. It is possible to do the right thing, based on all the available evidence at the time, but for that ‘right’ decision to have terrible consequences because things go wrong. It is also possible to bungle a decision, do the ‘wrong’ thing and for everything to work out ‘just fine’.

If something does go wrong, the Court Martial will always have what actually happened in front of them and with the benefit of hindsight, the outcome to a particular decision can appear very obvious. Taking into account what was understood at the time – what was known (or sometimes, what should have been known) and how this shaped the intention of the actor is essential to ascribing accountability or blame should something go wrong.