The Promise: The BasicBlockBuilding of Accountability

ACCOUNTABILITY HAS BECOME a major buzzword of late, cited to be at the core of market meltdowns and revivals, and one of the basic buildings blocks of successful businesses. As a result, it has become a topic of investigation by a large coterie of consultants, social scientists and practitioners. Break the riddle of accountability, the thinking goes, and you will have solved one of the thorniest issues in modern business.

In spite of the intellectual cornucopia developing around accountability – from pay-for-performance to management by objectives to self-discovery and ‘empowerment’ in its various guises –we are no closer to solving the fundamental problem than we were when Plato transcribed Socrates’ sallies in the Agora. This, I argue, is because most of the proposed approaches focus narrowly on tasks, responsibilities, personal attributes and measurement systems – all of which are important aspects of accountability, but overlook its most important features: its relationality, reflexivity and relativity

Accountability is relational in that it involves a promise or commitment from me to you; it is reflexive in that it says something about me and about our relationship that I have to internalize and accept; and it is relative to a set of background assumptions and a background audience – made up of those who can witness my commitment to you and those who cannot, but could.

The I-Thou Interaction

The basic building block of accountability is an act so complex that only humans can commit it: the promise. A promise is a speech act that is much more than just oral noise: it is oral noise that binds one to a course of action. The analysis of accountability proposed here focuses squarely on this speech act as the most important feature of organizational life, and on the promise as the basic building block of accountability.

When am I accountable? I am accountable to you for carrying out some action to which I have committed by promising to carry it out. We should not confuse being accountable with being responsible. Accountability is broader: it envisions that I may not fulfill the promise but, in that case, it demands that I produce a satisfactory account of why I have not. How we handle broken promises is every bit as important to the quality of a culture as is the raw score of kept vs. unkept promises.

The basic unit of analysis of a promise is ‘the I-Thou interaction’, which unfolds on four distinct planes:

1. Behavioural: which behaviours, including verbal behaviours, do we produce toward each other when I make the promise and you accept it?

2. Affective: what sentiments or feelings do we feel and express towards each other when I make the promise and you accept it?

3. Visceral: what raw feels and sensations do I express and understand you to express when I make a promise and you accept it?

4. Discursive: what thoughts and beliefs do I express and understand you to express in the context of the interaction? What reasons and arguments do we put forth towards each other?

Promises work on all four planes simultaneously. If I promise to deliver a document to you by tomorrow at 5 pm, but I do so with a snicker that belies my commitment, you will have reason to doubt my words. If you show this doubt to me, I have reason to doubt that you accepted my promise, and may feel ‘freed’ in some way from carrying it out. If I promise to release the quarterly earnings on time, but display mockery and disgust at the theatricality of the whole interaction with shareholders, analysts and pundits, then you have reason to doubt my authenticity and the veracity of my promise. You may even proceed to create your own earnings report, just in case I fail to fulfill my promise, leaving me feeling betrayed when I do produce the report.

The Role of ‘The Others’

Within organizations, the ‘I-Thou dyad’ described above does not live in a vacuum. It is embedded inside three additional layers of interactions, which are ordered according to immediacy and directness:

• They comprises the people that are direct witnesses to my promise, providing an audience and a forum for resolving disputes. They could be the members of an executive team, a board of directors or a product design team who all have direct access to the speech act that gave rise to the promise;

• Them comprises those that are known to both parties, are not direct witnesses to the interaction, but could provide a ‘third opinion’ if called upon to do so. Examples include absentee team members and mutual friends and acquaintances. Them will typically be known to both I and Thou, will know both I and Thou, and both I and Thou will know that them knows both I and Thou; • Those comprises ‘ideal observers’ –more rational, aware beings that could be invoked by either party as a hypothetical witness –or a cultural archetype that embodies what ‘most people’ would do or think about the interaction. Those could also be an unbiased but still-hypothetical third party that could be invoked as part of a calling-to-account or a reason-giving enterprise to adjudicate between us in case of a disagreement.

The Promise Itself

The stage is now set for us to analyze the promise itself. The four planes of an interaction described above allow us to consider typical accountability episodes in a unified fashion, by examining the varied promises, reasons, sentiments and beliefs that exist on the ‘stage’ on which the I-Thou interaction unfolds, and who comprises They, Them and Those in the forms of audiences, arbiters and adjudicators.

The framework works as follows: whenever I and Thou exchange energy in the form of oral noise, the sense in which I is accountable to Thou (or, vice-versa) will be defined and examined with respect to the mutual expectations within the dyad that the interaction sets up and the match or mismatch between the induced expectations and the individual’s self-attribution of accountability for fulfilling them, which in turn is analyzed with respect to the expectations that the interaction sets up for They, Them and Those, and as a function of the causal powers that TheyThem-Those have in the context of the dyad. What emerges is a plenary sense of ‘accountability’ that embraces the reciprocal (IThou ), relational ( I-They, I-Them, I-Those ) and reflexive ( I-I, Thou-Thou) dimensions of the phenomenon.

As indicated, the prototypical accountability scenario uses as the starting point the making of a promise (by I to Thou ). The following analysis aims to make clear the role that the protagonists ( I-Thou-They-Them-Those , or ‘IT4’) and the planes of their interaction (behavioural-affective-visceral-discursive, or ‘BAVD’) take on in determining the presence and legitimacy of accountability assignments.

Step 1: Making a promise.

I makes a promise to Thou. The promise is genuine if it is a cred- ible undertaking to bring about a particular event at a particular time, such that I and Thou can both ascertain whether or not the event has occurred, as can They, to the hypothetical satisfaction of Them and Those. An ‘event’ entails a change in the property of a substance at a specified time. A common pitfall of accountability interventions is to overlook the power of promissory language to equivocate by causing confusion. Promising to produce a difficult-to-observe change ‘at some point in the future’ is not a promise at all, because it has not specified an ‘event’.

In addition, not all promises actually promise: some are not genuine, others are inauthentic, and some are self-refuting (‘I promise to stop making promises’). In all such cases, the promise is not credible. We need a model of a real promise: in making a real promise, I produces behaviour and evinces feelings and sensations that persuade both Thou and They that the promise is authentic, in the sense that by making it, I binds himself to a commitment to bring about the promised event, and, that both Them and Those would be persuaded that the promise is authentic had they witnessed I’s commitment.

Step 2: Accepting the commitment embodied in the promise. If there are no incongruities between I’s words, body language, thoughts, feelings and raw feels that Thou can discern – which might lead Thou to doubt the authenticity of I’s commitment – Thou accepts I’s promise. Accepting a promise is not a trifle, and most people will correctly feel that they have ‘un-committed’ themselves if their promise is not duly acknowledged and accepted in the right tone, with the right facial expression and the right words that jointly signal that Thou has accepted the promise at its face value. If acceptance of a promise by Thou is authentic and genuine, I will recognize this, and Thou will know that I knows this, either on account of I signaling this to Thou, or of Thou independently ascertaining it. I is therebyaccountable to Thou for the promise made.

Step 3: Anticipating the breach of a promise.

Assume that, for some reason unknown to I at the time he made the promise, he will not be able to live up to his word. ‘Anticipatory breach’ is very much part of our model of promises, for it is there, as much as in any other part of the promising enterprise, that credibility and commitment are made and un-made. I realizes, before the promise comes due that he will not be able to keep it, for reasons that either were unexpected but could have been foreseen (by only I himself; only Thou himself, They alone, Them alone, Those alone, any subset of the above, or all together) at the time the promise was made and accepted; or, were unexpected and unforeseeable by anyone at the time the promise was made. In this case, I has to decide whether or not to inform Thou of the upcoming impasse, whether or not to take responsibility for the failure of foresight, and what account (if any) to give to Thou or They for the failure of foresight. If, for instance, the decision could not have been foreseen by anyone except Thou at the time the promise was made, then I may be justified (in the eyes of They, Them, Those) in not taking responsibility for the failure of foresight (although I is still ‘on the hook’ for forewarning Thou about the upcoming breach of his promise); and in giving an account that makes Thou at least co-responsible with I for the failure of foresight.

Because many of us promise more than we can deliver with alarming frequency, the realm of anticipatory breach is quite often where executives and the cultures they create make or break their accountability fabric. The difference between a flake and a responsible person cannot be ascertained in a one dimensional ‘score’ of kept vs. un-kept promises: it also involves the integrity and cohesiveness of the process by which responsibility for anticipatory breach of a promise is handled.

Step 4: Ascertaining the breach or fulfillment of a promise I does not fulfill the promise made to Thou, in the sense that the event that I had undertaken to cause was not observed by Thou or They, nor would it have been observed by Them or Those had they been able to make their own independent observations. Note that, at this point, the promise as made by I has been breached, but the breach has not yet been ascertained. The quarterly report was not delivered by I as promised, but no one has noted this yet. In organizations, most breached promises are passed over in the silence that befits ‘politeness norms’, which hide, nevertheless, a deep-seated lack of respect for the identity and commitment of the promissory.

Alternatively, the promise has been fulfilled: the report was produced, on time, at the right level of detail and with the right level of diligence. Again, there is likely no acknowledgement at this step of the analysis, despite the fact that acknowledgment is as important to kept promises as it is to broken ones: acknowledgment signals a release of I from his commitment to Thou via a successful discharge of I’s obligation to keep his promise.

Step 5: Ascertaining and accepting that the promise has been breached

I awakens, and, once awake, knows that the event that I had undertaken to cause was not observed by Thou or They, nor would it have been observed by Them or Those, and does not disagree. Thou knows that I knows this (or ascertains it by bringing it to I’s attention) and infers from I’s lack of disagreement with the ver- dict of non-performance the fact that I agrees with it. I knows this as well, and knows that Thou knows that I knows it. Under these conditions, I genuinely feels and believes that his promise to Thou has been breached, and that he needs to account for this breach. I knows that Thou knows this, and that Thou knows that I knows this.

Step 6: Giving accounts for breaking the promise

Giving an account for a breached promise entails one or more of the following: a. producing an exculpation in the form of an explanation of the causes of the breach of the promise (“it was physically impossible to carry out the promise on account of X, which was something that I could not have foreseen at the time of the promise”); b. producing an exculpation in the form of a justification of the reasons of the breach of the promise (“it was morally impossible or undesirable to carry out the promise on account of Y, which was something that I could not have foreseen at the time of the promise”); c. producing an inculpation for the breached promise, wherein I takes responsibility for some failure of knowing, feeling or doing that led him to breach the promise.

They, Them and Those play crucial roles in both exculpations (explanations, justifications) and inculpations, which together I will call accounts. They, Them and Those function as (real or hypothetical) arbiters of: what a legitimate cause of a breach is (what it is that I can claim to ‘not have been able to do’); what a legitimate reason is (what it is that I can claim to ‘not have been able to feel or want’); and what it is that I can claim to ‘not have been able to anticipate’ at the time of the promise. In producing accounts for the breach of his promise, I produces the right language with the right feeling at the right time toward the right person (Thou), which causes Thou to accept I’srecognition of the failure and the excuse provided as authentic.

Step 7: Accepting or rejecting the accounts given

Whether or not Thou believes that the account is genuine (that I is not self-deceived about it) and valid (that it would be accepted by a They, Them and Those that operate above a minimum standard of integrity and competence) is something that Thou decides on the basis of not only I’s behaviour and evinced emotions, but also on the basis of Thou’s all-things-considered evaluation of I. In the ideal accountability scenario, Thou informs I about whether or not Thou has accepted I’s account for his breached promise, and, once again, the same standards apply: Thou produces the right language, with the right feeling, at the right time, toward the right