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Self-accountability concept

Last post 06:37 am July 10, 2014 by Ian Mitchell
1 reply
Alex Ballarin Latre
05:55 am July 10, 2014

Hi all,

I would like some advice about the self-accountability concept in Scrum, specially because English is not my mother tongue so I might loose some of its semantics.

When we say that team members in scrum increase their feeling of self-accountability, do we mean that they cannot blame anyone else by the wrong decissions since all of them are decided by the team. An opposite wrong meaning could be that they feel more observed or they can be blamed more easily.

Is this meaning correct? What do you think?

Thanks!

Ian Mitchell
06:37 am July 10, 2014

> When we say that team members in scrum increase their feeling of
> self-accountability, do we mean that they cannot blame anyone else
> by the wrong decissions since all of them are decided by the team.
> An opposite wrong meaning could be that they feel more observed
> or they can be blamed more easily.

There is an English saying: "an optimist sees a glass as half full, while a pessimist sees it as half empty".

Both of the meanings you have ascribed to "self-accountability" concern the difficulty of apportioning blame elsewhere. That's the half of the glass which is empty.

However a team that is truly self-accountable will own its working practices and the means of delivery. Therefore, pretty much by definition, it will be respected and trusted as a skilled body and it's members will be motivated accordingly. That's the other half of the glass and it is the more valuable one.

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