By deepening the subject of the Responsibility Process, I understand better and better how to apply it to myself in order to be more free in my choices and my actions. The question I often ask myself is rather how I could implement it as part of an Agile transformation. I had the opportunity to test it as part of a community retrospective but I have not yet included him in a structured support process.
Through my research, I came across a article by Christopher Avery talking about the connections between Agility and the Accountability Process. I offer you a translation, with his agreement, in order to explore the subject together through a different prism.
Good reading ! 🙂
[Translation]
Is there something missing in your Agile implementation efforts that you can't quite put your finger on? Maybe the Accountability Process can help.
No business sector has so widely adopted the Accountability process (described below) than Agile/Lean/Scrum/Kanban/XP (henceforth, “agile” or “agility”) communities.
For what ?
Because it fits very well. The Accountability Process is a powerful and organic self-leadership tool for taking responsibility and claiming the freedom, choice, and power that comes with it. It is a brilliant common language for appropriation and non-appropriation, as well as an elegant meaning-making tool.
Each of these whys speaks directly to the fundamental values and principles of agility.
Many leaders and agile coaches find the Accountability Process valuable in their own agility as well as in building agile teams, leaders, and cultures. Speaking of the Accountability Process, a client working in agile leadership development wrote:
I am really impressed by its depth, its power and its subtlety.
However, for many leaders and agile coaches, what the Accountability Process can offer them is not at all clear. This article is an attempt to make more explicit the connections between agility and the Accountability Process.
In this article, I will assume that you are familiar with the rapidly expanding Agile movement in software, project management, product development, and business. Otherwise, the Hacker Chic offers a quick overview.
The Accountability Process is nowhere near as well known as Agile. I'll describe it quickly, then point to 9 specific connections with agility.
What is the Accountability Process?
The power of the model is that it changes the conversation of morals and character around responsibility, into a learning and growth conversation.
The process, or pattern, is triggered when something goes wrong, even small things:
- a car stops right in front of you,
- a critical team member skips an important meeting,
- there's no coffee left.
Since life and work rarely seem perfect, this mental pattern is quite often active in all of us.
Each position in the sequence is a mental state with its own cause and effect logic. When we process our thoughts about problems, we (unconsciously and naturally) start at the bottom first, where the logic of cause and effect is simplistic and the computational effort is low. If we like (that is, accept) the response our mind offers us (It's his fault!), we settle into the simplistic logic of cause and effect of this mental state.
For example, in the Prosecution, we are sure that someone else has to change for the problem to go away. If we don't accept the answer that our mind offers us, then we go up in the sequence. So taking responsibility is the ultimate courageous act of refusing to accept our mind's attempts to deny, accuse, justify, blame ourselves, or feel trapped in obligation.
It is only in the mental state of Responsibility that we free our mind to access our paths of creative and complex reasoning to learn, grow, and overcome the problem. In Lean terms, it is said that below the line thought and action are wasted; above the line rests the thought and action of value.
Of course, there is a lot of "depth, power, and subtlety" behind this brief introduction. Search The Responsibility Process to find other resources. Look especially for those posted by agilists.
Note: that's good, I have 2 to offer you! 🙂 |
Agility and responsiveness
As an Agile practitioner progresses, they often see Agile tools, processes, and methodologies as the simple part of Agile. It's the people, the culture and the leadership that can be the most challenging. This is where the Accountability Process comes in.
The Accountability Process is a meta skill, so the connections with agility are also meta, more at the level of principles than practices. This meta quality is the power of the Accountability Process that so many agilists recognize. It is an exceptional tool for self-leadership. It is a useless tool for controlling people or processes.
Here are some of the specific connections I see for agile leaders and coaches with the Accountability Process to implement in their daily practice.
Results-oriented self-organization
As a sense-making tool, the Accountability Process can add significant fluidity to the thoughts and actions of agile teams, programs, and organizations. A Scrum Alliance article about the core values of Scrum states that:
… team accountability in Scrum is critical.
But to achieve team responsibility, we want individuals to operate from the mental state of Responsibility so that they can make sense of obstacles, conflicts, and annoyances. Agile leaders and coaches who promote Process Responsibility in their teams say it is an extremely positive force for self-organization.
Thinking about agility and self-organization, ask these questions:
- Where are we in the Accountability Process when things don't seem right?
- How much time and energy do we waste in adaptation states?
- Do we know how this pattern works in our mind and how to practice accountability in order to quickly return to relevant thoughts and actions?
Appropriation and confrontation of impediments
The biggest problems are between silos rather thanwithin silos (regardless of their size: roles, teams, functions, organizations). Addressing them is put personal and shared responsibility ahead of role responsibility (in the sense of accountability).
A lack of ownership persists in most organizations where people are focused on their individual roles rather than optimizing the whole. This is evident in costed approaches to agile processes where people may be put off by the idea of confronting impediments. Instead, they ignore or hide them, choosing to live with them rather than face them and make them their own.
When groups of people adopt and practice the Accountability Process together, they tend to be much more collaborative, mutually supportive, and holistic in their approach to problem solving. They are aware of their own limits of thought. Practicing accountability through the Accountability Process often leads to thinking “together we are enough” and offering to play a more valuable game.
A flourishing culture and mindset of ownership
Agile leaders and coaches use the Accountability Process as a tool for problem solving, for having a common language around problems and challenges, and as a fundamental principle of organizing a team or a larger community. All to promote personal and shared responsibility and leadership. It is a powerful culture-building tool.
Here is a recommendation from an agile coach to others in his company to study and apply the Accountability Process. While he specifically talks about their involvement in an eLearning community called The Leadership Gift Program, I removed much of his comment to focus on the Accountability Process.
Christopher's work profoundly transformed the way I worked with my clients long before he started this program and I have come to consider him a personal friend. I encouraged Christopher to find a way to scale his work so that it didn't require a local presence - partly because the world needed his work, and partly because I had that much more need his help. When he launched his first remote session, I immediately jumped at the chance.
Having shared my biases, I will reinforce my initial statement with these assertions:
Mastering personal responsibility is the foundation of the Avery program. I think it's also the most fundamental skill to behave in an agile way. Any tools I can offer a client are overlooked if that client is operating in an irresponsible manner. My ability to help them depends on my ability to help them return to a place of personal responsibility. Avery's program is invaluable, perhaps indispensable, for anyone involved in coaching.
The Accountability Process is the most useful coaching tool I have found.
—Ashley Johnson, Agile Coach, Industrial Logic
More humanity and respect
The Accountability Process shows us that people are not bad or incorrect to blame or make do with their problems rather than owning and addressing them, they are human. And humans are hard-wired to deal with it when you don't know how to grow up. This awareness generates compassion, of empathy, and of listening. All of this brings humanity, belonging and positivity to agile organizations.
When leaders in a system stop blaming people, they start taking responsibility for the system they created. They realize that to change things, they must change themselves and the system so that people can thrive and be useful.
The Accountability Process is an exceptional tool to support leaders in understanding and changing themselves and the system. Many leaders, from team leaders to CEOs, call the Accountability Process the secret sauce in their system.
Inspiring shared leadership
Leadership is often defined as taking responsibility for something bigger than yourself, and in doing so, inspiring others to join you in that pursuit. So leadership is not a title, position, authority, or status. It is taking ownership of a problem, opportunity, or change, and mobilizing others to help through vision, purpose, and community.
Agility and the Accountability Process both promote more leadership, not necessarily more leaders.
Peter Koestenbaum, the distinguished institutional philosopher, has written extensively on the spirit of leadership and personal responsibility. The following paragraph is an excerpt from one of his Weekly Leadership Thought (emails I recommend subscribing to) titled Do You Choose to Activate Your Freedom?
The essence of a human being is that non-material, non-biological core of freedom, that divine burst of light within your body. […] To be human is to welcome this freedom within, but to be a leader is to have chosen, with this same freedom, to affirm the power of freedom, to appropriate it, and consciously and deliberately activate it in everything you do.
Nothing happens unless you trigger it. Your liability is extended. Wherever you are, your sphere of influence, your ability to affect events, to get things done, goes far beyond the sound of your voice and the reach of your eyes.
I believe agile leadership calls for choosing and owning that glow within. Practicing the Accountability Process goes in the direction of shine the light within and in others.
Better decision making and problem solving
Taking responsibility puts you in a proactive position in recognizing, generating and choosing options. Agilists who practice the Accountability Process report experiencing a greater clarity and one biggest choice around their decisions.
No problem can be solved until someone owns it. In states of adaptation, the real problem is rarely recognized and addressed. People practicing responsibility know that they have to either own the problem or own the consequences.
Better decision-making and problem-solving results in faster experimentation, learning, correction, and taking effective action.
Thrive in change
Agility is the ability to change without changing. That is to say, the ability to change what we do without changing who we are and what we stand for. It is a problem of focus, a value of Scrum. In the mental state of responsibility change is natural and easy; in all states of adaptation below the line, one resists change.
Practicing accountability through the Accountability Process means practice change and responsiveness rather than rigidity and resistance.
Appreciative reflection and feedback
Many teams perform work with or without feedback and learning opportunities present.
Some of the best applications of the Accountability Process are with agile leaders and coaches who facilitate the team to truly own the dynamics of feedback, reflection and learning.
Here is an example, a blog post by Tim Schraepen offering ways to use the Responsibility Process in a retrospective.
call to practice
Agility, and especially agile leadership, calls for acting from our creative, free and powerful mind rather than our reactive mind, to respond and adapt to every moment of our life and our business. The Accountability Process offers you a tool that is already within you, a tool to activate and grow your innate leadership capacity, to then help others discover it as well.
Knowing the Accountability Process is fun and inspiring, but knowing it is not enough. The Accountability Process will only work for you if you put it into practice. How to start? Download a poster PDF in color of the Accountability Process, available in 27 languages. Print it out and post it where you can see it often. Then start noticing your own mental states. Look for a colleague, or 2 or 3, who will study it and apply it with you. Share this article with the people you care about and start a discussion. When you're ready to go further, there are plenty of resources available to support you.
It will change your life.
Thank you for reading this article. Your comments and questions are welcome. I'm sure there are connections I forgot or didn't explain as well as I could. And I bet others will be able to offer different perspectives.
Christopher Avery, “The Responsibility Process guy”, founded The Leadership Gift™ Program to make world-class personal leadership development accessible to individuals worldwide. His books include The Responsibility Process and Teamwork Is An Individual Skill.
