RACI talk: the difference between accountable and responsible
Earlier, a friend posted a question I find myself googling about once a year:
(She’s great, by the way, and you should hire her for usability & accessibility stuff.)
It’s well worth expanding the whole thread. I thought about the question entirely in business terms (esp. project management) which is what I witter about below. But the lawyers, they have things to say.
In RACI matrix land (which is far less interesting than the theory of law), business analysts and project managers will tell you that, no, accountable and responsible are not the same.
By conventional wisdom:
Responsible - you're the one doing the work
Accountable - you're the one getting bollocked if the work isn't done
Those are different, and importantly so, but you have to think about it for a minute.
For completeness:
Consulted - you're getting asked stuff about doing the work
Informed - you're getting told that someone either has done or is about to do the work
Even in domain specific project management usage, these are roles not people. That’s part of where the ambiguity seeps in. You can be responsible and accountable, or only one of those things.
Speaking of which, briefly: I'd recommend informing anyone you consult, and trying to consult anyone you expect to inform. Change management is so often the business of minimising surprise. It's kinder.
Right. Why the rest of the confusion? Because to the casual ear, responsible and accountable sound the same. You can, in perfectly reasonable English usage be responsible for doing something and responsible for seeing that it's done. You can be held to account for not doing something yourself. You can take responsibility for an outcome.
When technical or academic domain language leaks into common usage (see: Privilege) or gets constructed from common terms (as here) we're at the mercy of the whole glorious squishiness of the human mind, and the fact that it's a miracle language works at all. Think of a rock, are we thinking of the same rock? How do we both know it's a rock? And all that blew your mind in the first year of university psycholinguistic shit that makes communication so spicy and exciting.
Anyway.
How do we remember the difference between "responsible" and "accountable"?
Don't bother.
Really. I mean it.
Let's hop back to one of the most fungibly useful questions I have ever encountered: What outcome are we looking for here?
No one writes a RACI matrix for shits and giggles. Usually, it's because you're looking to resolve a lack of clarity or consensus on a project. While clarity can sometimes be delivered from on high, consensus does not arrive by fiat. There's going to be a conversation. The conversation is going to surface where people aren't aligned. It's going to show us what they think accountability and responsibility mean in this particular situation, and who has which, and where it's all broken. The conversation is the point.
We're trying to have that conversation so we can build a common alignment, so we can stop bickering about who owns what and who didn't brush the giraffes or whatever, and actually deliver the damn project.
So lean in to the ambiguity. If somebody asks "wait, what does responsible mean?" that's good. If nobody asks, you get to theatrically disambiguate the two and start some chat.
As an aside: because all tools have good and bad faith uses (a hammer can build or bludgeon) where a lack of clarity exists, people have the opportunity to supply their own. This ambiguity can be a creative opportunity either to take charge of something you're excited by, or to shirk something with disaster written all over it. Build, don't bludgeon, obvs, but be mindful that this cantankerous genie exists, and disambiguation can be power. Especially if you're the one being presented with a RACI matrix, rather than trying to tease one out. Definitely start the conversation there before you sign the contract.
My take is that these are easily confused common words with domain-specific meanings, and the difference does matter. But language isn't telepathy, and humans are a mess. So rather than remember which is which, get everyone involved to agree terms up front.