Sidney Dekker says that accountability only works when people are given authority over their responsibilities. Real work is full of responsibility-authority mismatches.People are given task responsibilities with no purchasing authority over the equipment they use.People are given knowledge responsibilities with no authority over the training they receive.People are given workers to lead with no authority over the hiring or orientation process.We can effectively hold people accountable as long we give them the authority to make the needed decisions on what they are responsible for. Do we recognize these responsibility-authority mismatches in our everyday interactions?Do we talk about it out loud? Or is it just the unspoken truth we keep inside?Does management acknowledge these mismatches? Are they aware of them?Are we doing something about it?Some things we can work on, like training programs, purchasing authority and the hiring process. Some things we can’t control, like the client’s schedule. If we first gain awareness to these issues, we can focus on improving the system where possible. We can also use error reduction tools where we can’t. That is the heart of human performance. Gaining awareness to system issues without judgement, recognizing the difference between systems we can control and imperfect circumstances we can minimize error within, talking the language out loud, and taking action.

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