You can hold a person answerable only for what they had the power to control. Break that rule and you do not get accountability. You get a scapegoat.
When something goes badly wrong, an organization reaches for a name. Someone must be accountable, and that instinct is healthy, right up until you ask the question that separates accountability from its counterfeit: did the person we are blaming actually have the power to prevent it?
Proportional Accountability is the principle: a person can be held answerable only for what they were given the authority to control. Responsibility and authority must be matched. Where you grant authority, accountability fairly follows; where you withhold it, blame cannot. Break the match, hand someone the consequences of decisions they were never allowed to make, and you have not created accountability. You have built a blame sink.
The blame sink is a structure, not an accident. It is a role designed, often without anyone intending it, to absorb the failure of decisions made above it: answerable for the outcome, denied authority over the inputs. When the failure comes, and it will, because the person in the role could never actually prevent it, the organization gets to punish someone, feel that justice was done, and change nothing. The next person steps into the same trap.
So before you assign blame, run the test in reverse. Is anyone here accountable for an outcome they lacked the authority to change? Where the answer is yes, you have not found the person who failed. You have found the person the structure elected to fail, and the real fault sits one level up, with whoever holds the authority that the blame does not.
This completes Position. Earned Authority puts the right person in the decision; Independence keeps them honest; Proportional Accountability ensures they are judged only for what was theirs to decide. Get the pillar wrong and the most capable, most independent leader in the world is still just a name waiting to be blamed. Get it right, and accountability finally points to where the power actually is.
The Precedent
In 1757 the British shot one of their own admirals. John Byng had been sent to relieve Minorca with too few ships, too late, against a stronger French fleet; he fought an inconclusive action and withdrew. The government that had underestimated the threat and denied him the reinforcements he asked for court-martialed him, and he was executed by firing squad on his own quarterdeck. Voltaire, watching from France, had a character in Candide remark that the English find it useful to shoot an admiral now and then to encourage the others. Byng was answerable for a defeat he had not been given the means to prevent. The word for that is not accountability.
In Other Words
“In this country it is thought good to kill an admiral from time to time, to encourage the others.” Voltaire, Candide
“The search for a scapegoat is the easiest of all hunting expeditions.” Dwight D. Eisenhower
The Test
Is anyone here accountable for an outcome they lacked the authority to change?
Next: Pillar II, Truth. Once the right person is in place, the question becomes whether a fact can even reach them. Beginning with Transparency.
This is one principle of Trust Architecture, a framework for building organizations where the truth survives contact with power. New here? Start with The Framework; the full definitions live in The Principles.
Free to read and share under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Framework and essays © 2026 Ankush Chowdhary. See Ethics and Transparency for how this work is produced.