This week has been about governance. It has been so much about governance.

Governance in the corporate space is the endless quest to point at someone and say “You, you are accountable for this outcome; and you, you are responsible for this outcome.” And then you sneak away while they argue what those two words mean.

This gets real spicy when it comes to agile projects. It’s like the difference between classical and quantum mechanics. At the classical level, we can model atoms like billiard balls. At the quantum level, we have to model them like fuzzy fields of possibility. Both are true at the same time, but that’s only really doable for atoms.

At the most basic level of an agile project you’ve got the team. The team is, from one perspective, a fuzzy and diffuse set of responsibilities. Spending time nailing down who is responsible for the fuzzy and unknowable thing that is a service is the sort of job that rests alongside “go and get me some stripey paint” and “we need a bag of nail holes”. We accept that there’s a service and a team, and it’s probably best if we leave it at that. “The team is responsible for the service,” I say, sagely, and saunter off. They are responsible, after all. They’re the only ones who can pull the levers that make the service do things, like get better, or fall over.

“And who’s accountable for it?” someone asks, before I can leave.

Accountable is trickier. Accountable says that someone more senior than you is going to ask you to explain your decisions. In the UK Civil Service, accountability flows upwards in two directions: to the minister, for the policy intent; and to the Permanent Secretary, for the implementation.

(If you say delivery instead of implementation, the ghost of all past content writers come out of your computer and make your tea cold. True story.)

Anyone who’s accountable for something can make someone else accountable for a part of it. It’s not delegation, exactly. The person at the top is still accountable to the person above them; it’s just that they may also hold the person below them accountable.

Are you completely bored of the word accountable? Hey, me too!

If you’re thinking “why doesn’t he just replace it with a synonym, like responsible,” I’m going to hit you on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper.

Responsible people should have a hold of the levers that make something happen. Some people are responsible and accountable, but their responsibilities should be commensurate to their position and their levers. The person at the top of the organisation does not have the levers to actually – let’s say – recruit enough soldiers to fill vacancies, or stamp out bullying and harassment, or make sure there’s always tea and coffee in the break room.

They’re accountable for those outcomes. There’s no question of that. But they can’t be responsible for them – or, at least, not at that level of granularity. They don’t have the levers. More and more, as I get more senior, I realise that the people who are accountable have very few levers. Those levers that we have are long and their effects are not always clear, and not a single one of them is marked “Achieve Outcome X”.

There’s plenty of soft power, and there’s mechanisms that boil down to: make someone else accountable, make someone else responsible. Make the outcome more granular as you go down the line, and hope that when all the outcomes you’ve made other people accountable for are achieved yours are achieved as well. Making folks accountable for chunks of things frees you up, too: if they are accountable for achieving an outcome, then they also need from you the freedom to make decisions to achieve that outcome.

But you’re still the one left holding the baby if it all goes wrong. “I made them accountable for this!”, you cry. Yes, comes the reply. And now you are being held accountable for that decision.

So here I am, at the end of the week. I’m thinking so hard about governance and how we design the environment of accountabilities and responsibilities so that we can actually move. Accountability that accumulates at the centre slows down decision making which slows down implementation. Responsibility without the levers to make the changes you need crushes morale.

It does end up with me inching towards a suggestion that the totality of senior responsibilities should be “hire a really good team to achieve the things you’re accountable for”, while their accountabilities should be clearly written down as objectives.

That’s for Monday, though. For now, let’s dive into the weekend, with one small brag from me. I went to my first public speaking club evening last night, and I won a prize straight out of the gates.

As it turns out, all this writing for you, all this chatting shit with cool people late into the night – all of it has made me a good enough speaker that I can wow a crowd of strangers.

So cheers gang. I appreciate you.