Personal Responsibility

Recently, I played the murder mystery game Pentiment. The game, set in the 16th-century fictional Bavarian town Tassing, tells the development and shift in authority in the town through the Reformation. There is a moment of satire that reveals something profound about human nature. After the church loses control of the town, a few anxious citizens gather to form a town council. Lacking any real power or authority, the newly formed council focuses on mundane infrastructure and creates a ritualized inspection of all hinges. Not because of failed door hinges, but because in the absence of accountability, people crave visible ritualized control. The system diffuses responsibility perfectly; everyone participates and “does their part”. If something goes wrong, the system failed, not any particular person.

I see this pattern everywhere in modern organizations. Responsibility rituals, in the form of alignment meetings, steering committees, compliance checklists, and decision logs, no one reads, give the appearance of ownership without creating consequences. They quietly assume: “If we follow the process correctly, the outcome will take care of itself.” Real responsibility is personal, exposes people, and can be unfair and emotionally exhausting. Therefore, responsibility rituals are usually attractive. They protect individuals by distributing ownership so widely that no single person can be held accountable. They feel inclusive and collaborative and generate documentation that proves “we did everything right”, even when results are poor.

But they don’t change behavior.

When a product launch fails after months of alignment meetings, the postmortem identifies “communication gaps” and “process improvements”. New templates are created. Additional checkpoints are added. But the people who made the decisions that led to failure are in the same roles, making similar decisions because the system absolved them. But here is the deeper problem: even replacing those individuals won’t fix anything. The issue isn’t as much about people hiding from authority as it is about a system designed to make individual accountability structurally impossible. People cannot be held accountable for outcomes they lack the authority to meaningfully shape.

While the words accountability and responsibility are often used interchangeably, there is a critical distinction many organizations miss: responsibility can be shared, but accountability cannot. Responsibility refers to a set of ongoing tasks or duties assigned to an individual to fulfill a specific role. It can be distributed across a team, delegated to others or shared, or collectively owned. Accountability, by contrast, is retrospective, results-focused, and individually owned. While an individual can delegate tasks to others, they cannot delegate the accountability for the final outcome. It requires the ability “to give account” and to explain not just what happened, but specifically what you did or didn’t do that shaped the result.

The distinction is often blurred in the German language, where the single term Verantwortung frequently encompasses both concepts. When translating the Scrum Guide 2020, German translators had to intentionally diverge from standard linguistic patterns to capture the differences, translating accountability as “Ergebnisverantwortung” (responsibility for results) and responsibility as “Umsetzungsverantwortung” (responsibility for implementation). See: (https://jensen-und-komplizen.de/accountability-vs-responsibility/). This reveals something deeper. The blur is not just semantics, it reflects a cultural pattern.

I’ve seen this pattern repeatedly in German organizations’ adoption of the Scrum framework. Many leaders understand the framework as the team is collectively responsible for deliverables and quality, while the product owner is responsible for what gets delivered. In practice, however, their hand is forced by stakeholder priorities, steering committees, and budget holders, who actually determine what gets developed. The Product Owner becomes a status reporter, coordinating features they didn’t choose towards business objectives they can’t influence. This isn’t a misunderstanding of Scrum. It’s a fundamental mismatch between a framework built on empowered decision-making and an organizational culture designed around distributed authority. When you ask “who is accountable if this product fails to achieve business results?” the answer dissolves into the system: the team delivered what was asked, the PO prioritized what stakeholders requested, the steering committee approved based on available information. Everyone did their job. No one shaped the outcome.

There are of course, higher managers in charge of the overall initiative and its alignment with business objectives. But they operate at a level of abstraction that prevents them from actually shaping the product. They set strategic direction, approve budgets, and review progress in periodic business reviews. What they don’t do is make the hundreds of small decisions every week that determine whether the product will actually work. Which feature gets built first, what gets cut when timelines slip, and how to respond when user feedback deviates from the original strategy.

These decisions happen in daily work, made by people who lack the authority to deviate from the plan, overseen by managers too detached to intervene meaningfully. The result is a gap where accountability should live. Senior leaders are accountable for outcomes they can’t directly influence, while the people who could influence those outcomes lack the authority and, therefore, the accountability to do so.

This structural gap, where authority and accountability don’t align, appears across organizations, but I’ve noticed it’s particularly pronounced in traditional German corporate environments. Part of this stems from institutional features like codetermination (Mitbestimmung), where workers councils have formal involvement in operational decisions. Part stems from cultural preferences for consensus and process over individual decision-making authority. When failure occurs in this type of environment, the response shifts towards what might be called systemic accountability, focusing on structures and processes rather than individual decisions. Failure, in this culture, is treated more like a malfunctioning machine; the question becomes “which process broke?” rather than “which person made calls that didn’t work out?” This can lead to a situation where everyone contributed to a failure, so no individual decision maker emerges as accountable.

This approach has real benefits. It protects people from unfair blame, encourages psychological safety, and can lead to genuine process improvements. But it has a critical weakness: it doesn’t change behavior upstream.

Consider two of the largest corporate accounting fraud cases in recent history: Enron in the United States (2001) and Wirecard in Germany (2020). While Wirecard claimed €1.9bn in cash that didn’t exist, Enron hid massive debt by establishing numerous special-purpose entities; they reflect the same playbook in different eras. While the scandals were structurally similar, the responses were vastly different.

The response to the Enron scandal was swift and personal. Media pressure was relentless. Congress held hearings with named individuals. The accounting firm Arthur Andersen lost clients instantly, was indicted, and effectively destroyed before the conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2005. Beyond criminal prosecution, the scandal triggered the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which created new personal liabilities for executives certifying financial statements. The message was clear: “We would rather destroy institutions than tolerate ambiguity about responsibility”.

In comparison, Wirecard’s aftermath looked vastly different. While CEO Markus Braun was arrested and charged, others faded. As of early 2026 COO Jan Marsalek remains a fugitive. The broader response, however, focused heavily on systemic failure. Language turned procedural almost immediately. How did Germany’s financial regulator BaFin miss warning signs? Why didn’t EY catch the fraud? What regulatory gaps allowed this to happen? Committees were formed. BaFin restructured and admitted “mistakes”. EY paid fines, issued statements declaring “they were misled,” and continued operating with clients largely intact. The message to the market was clear: “audit failure is insurable, survivable, and abstract.” The intervention level focuses on procedural language and systemic incentives, often leaving personal incentives untouched.

The behavioral consequence is clear; while the US approach aims to change individual behavior, as executives know they personally face prison for fraud, German firms focus on formal compliance through documentation and oversight, whereas executives believe catastrophes are survivable if framed correctly.

This pattern is further evidenced in the Berlin Brandenburg airport project. Despite a nine-year delay and massive cost overruns, the project suffered from a revolving door of leadership. Contractors and planning firms were replaced. Each transition allowed the incoming leader to point blame at the predecessor. By the time the airport opened, the question around blame dissolved into complexity: changing regulations, contractor issues, and political interference, leading to a situation where “no one is really accountable” for the colossal loss.

The Deutsche Bahn 2008 corruption case illustrates this dynamic precisely. After initiating internal investigations that uncovered irregularities, the organization established a Compliance Steering Committee and produced extensive documentation and new compliance procedures. DB even brought in Transparency International, one of the most reputable anti-corruption organizations in the world and proudly published articles in its customer magazine. But TI’s actual influence on DB’s anti-corruption strategy was in their own words “only marginal”. Cooperation took place irregularly, mostly over phone calls after decisions had already been made. TI’s, Dr. Wiehen, the person DB had brought in to help fight corruption, later concluded, “We cannot assure that there has been an internal learning and regular evaluation process at DB […] we monitor the current events at DB from a distance. We are only observers.”

DB built an elaborate structure of responsibility. But the focus remained on procedural compliance, what could be documented and demonstrated, rather than on whether specific decision-makers who enabled or overlooked corruption faced consequences that would change future decisions. DB didn’t just fail to learn. It built a system that made it possible to appear as though learning had occurred, without it actually happening.

This gets at the heart of why systemic accountability often fails to prevent recurrence: it changes what people document, not what they do.

But here the obvious objection arises: isn’t this just advocating for toxic blame culture? The fear is legitimate. Organizations that punish individuals after failures risk creating environments, where people are scapegoated, blamed for decisions made with incomplete information, or paralyzed by the fear of being singled out. Instead of individual ownership, the system searches for a scapegoat in case of failure. Toxic blame doesn’t produce learning either, only self-preservation and the instinct to hide.

The difference between toxic blame and healthy accountability comes down to the relationship between authority and consequences. Toxic blame holds people accountable for outcomes they had no power to shape.

Healthy accountability requires a system where people are enabled to step forward as owners of the outcome, whether positive or negative. If you are accountable for whether a product succeeds, you have genuine ownership over the decisions that determine success. Healthy accountability is built on trust; people are empowered to make decisions, including wrong ones, without being destroyed by them. And crucially, it assumes good faith: the question after a failure isn’t “who do we punish”, but “what did you decide, why, and what would you do differently?” Learning becomes individual, not just systemic.

This is not a comfortable culture to work in. It demands more from individuals. It requires a high amount of trust and leaders to set clear expectations that enable team members to understand not just their tasks and responsibilities, but also how they tie into the broader goals of the organization and a common definition of success. It requires accepting that some decisions will be wrong, and that the right response is not to add another layer of oversight, but to trust that the person who made the call will learn from it.

The townspeople in Pentiment chose the hinge inspection ritual because it offered something essential: the feeling that someone was taking responsibility, even if that responsibility was completely hollow. There was no evidence hinges had failed, no competence to inspect them properly. But if something went wrong, they could point to the ritual. They were doing something.

It’s a deeply human response to uncertainty, and it’s exactly the response that most modern organizations have institutionalized.

The question isn’t whether we can eliminate that instinct. We can’t. The question is whether we’re willing to build structures that resist it—structures where people are trusted enough to own outcomes, empowered enough to shape them, and accountable enough to learn when they don’t.