Taking Responsibility in 10 Minutes

In October 2019, as part of the Agile Talks @ NEW WORK SE, I had the opportunity to give a 10 minute talk on agility. I decided to base my talk titled “Shared Responsibility” on the principle and book of the same name The Responsibility Process® by Christopher Avery.

Shared Responsibility

To be able to share responsibility we first need to know what responsibility is. Then we need to understand how to take 100% responsibility for our problems and actions. And at last, once we have learned that, we are finally able to share responsibility with others.

Starting with what is responsibility. Christopher Avery clearly seperates personal responsibility from accountability. Responsibility stands for feelings of ownership whereas accountability refers to managing agreements and expectations. In everyday life though responsibility and accountability are often used interchangeably.

The Responsibility Process® itself is a series of mental states that gets triggert by anxiety, frustration or upset. The pattern of the mental states is predictable hence the order. Each of the mental states serves its own cause-and-effect logic for the problem. You can find the original illustration by Christopher Avery here.

The Responsibility Process®

• Responsibility (I take action)
• Quit (I give up)
• Obligation (I have to but I don’t want to)
• Shame (I am guilty)
• Justify (Circumstances are causing my problem)
• Blame (Another person is causing my problem)
• Denial (I ignore my problem)

And how does this help to share resposibility?

Once we know The Resposibility Process® and have an idea how we can overcome our coping strategies for problems we can start practicing it with the following questions: How can you attract people to share responsibility with you? What can you do differently to (better) share responsibility in your group or system?

Conclusion

The fastes way to elevate responsibility in anyone or any group is to demonstrate it yourself!