Quotes About Accountability

In order to be able to know if we are making progress toward our goal, it's essential that everyone in the organization knows the current state of work. There

where mistakes are routinely punished and scapegoats fired. Punishing failure and "shooting the messenger" only cause people to hide their mistakes, and eventually, all desire to innovate is completely extinguished.

when something does go wrong, we conduct blameless post-mortems, not to punish anyone, but to better understand what caused the accident and how to prevent it. This

Our auditors, who I've long believed are a force for justice and objectivity, are crapping on me, too?

We cannot afford to have this leadership team be order takers. We pay you to think, not just do!

we are not talking to one another about what changes we're planning or implementing. This is not acceptable.

As has been proven time and again, the further the distance between the person doing the work (i.e., the change implementer) and the person deciding to do the work (i.e., the change authorizer), the worse the outcome.

Having developers share responsibility for the quality of the systems they build not only improves outcomes but also accelerates learning.

Dan Milstein, one of the principal engineers at Hubspot, writes that he begins all blameless post-mortem meetings by saying, "We're trying to prepare for a future where we're as stupid as we are today." In other words, it is not acceptable to have a countermeasure to merely "be more careful" or "be less stupid"— instead, we must design real countermeasures to prevent these errors from happening again.

We can outsource the work but not the responsibility.

Screwups like the san failure made us miss a Phoenix deliverable, and now we're paying for it.

INCREASE THE VISIBILITY OF WORK In order to be able to know if we are making progress toward our goal, it's essential that everyone in the organization knows the current state of work. There are many ways to make the current state visible, but what's most important is that the information we display is up to date, and that we constantly revise what we measure to make sure it's helping us understand progress toward our current target conditions.

But that's like throwing gasoline on the fire. Developers are even worse than networking people. Show me a developer who isn't crashing production systems, and I'll show you one who can't fog a mirror.

You can't just throw the pig over the wall to us, and

It's like the free puppy,

Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by Patrick Lencioni.

In other words, when we conflate deployment and release, it makes it difficult to create accountability for successful outcomes—decoupling these two activities allows us to empower Development and Operations to be responsible for the success of fast and frequent deployments, while enabling product owners to be responsible for the successful business outcomes of the release (i.e., was building and launching the feature worth our time).

When John agrees, I thank him for his time. "Wait, one more question. Why do you believe that this product didn't cause the failure? Did you test the change?" There's a short silence on the phone before John replies, "No, we couldn't test the change. There's no test environment. Apparently, you guys requested a budget years ago, but…" I should have known.

makes me angry when we need to make some heroic, diving catch because of someone else's lack of planning.

In high-performing organizations, everyone within the team shares a common goal—quality, availability, and security aren't the responsibility of individual departments but are a part of everyone's job, every day.

There's a chain of command: gripes go up, not down.

By removing blame, you remove fear; by removing fear, you enable honesty; and honesty enables prevention.

We should have done this a long time ago. We bump up the priorities of things all the time, but we never really know what just got bumped down. That is, until someone screams at us, demanding to know why we haven't delivered something.

work can bounce between teams endlessly due to incomplete information, or work can be passed onto downstream work centers with problems that remain completely invisible until we are late delivering what we promised to the customer or our application fails in the production environment.