We often talk about taking responsibility as though everyone understands exactly what they are being asked to take responsibility for.
But do they?
Something goes wrong in an organisation.
A machine breaks down.
A sale is lost.
A customer leaves.
A project misses its target.
The natural question can be:
Who was responsible?
But perhaps there is another question worth asking first.
What choices led to this outcome?
That is a subtly different question.
The person operating the machine may not have been responsible for it breaking.
The salesperson cannot be responsible for every customer’s decision not to buy.
And an individual working on a project cannot necessarily be responsible for everything that influenced its outcome.
But there will have been choices along the way.
Choices about what was noticed.
What was questioned.
What was communicated.
What was ignored.
What action was taken.
And sometimes, what wasn’t.
Human Agency is the ability of people to make helpful conscious choices and to act upon them.
So perhaps taking responsibility becomes more useful when we stop treating it simply as accepting ownership of an outcome and start becoming curious to learn about the choices that led to that outcome.
That changes the conversation.
Instead of:
Who got this wrong?
We can begin asking:
What happened?
What choices contributed?
What influenced those choices?
What can we learn from them?
And what might we choose differently next time?
Responsibility then becomes less about allocating blame and more about creating an opportunity to learn.
And that matters because an organisation can change a process, rewrite a procedure or introduce another training programme without necessarily understanding the human choices that produced the original result.
Which leaves an interesting question for anyone leading an organisation:
When something happens in your organisation, do you look primarily for who was responsible — or become curious to learn about the choices that led to the outcome?
Because understanding those choices isn’t simply about understanding the past.
It may help you understand what your organisation could do differently next time.
And perhaps that is where taking responsibility stops being something we associate with failure and starts becoming an opportunity for learning, improvement and growth.
If this perspective has sparked your curiosity, I’ve explored these ideas in much greater depth in my paper, Human Agency.
Related Articles:
Human Agency and Organisational Responsibility: How Helpful People Can Hide Structural Gaps
Responsibility Grows Where Agency Exists: Why Accountability Begins with Human Agency
How Human Agency Strengthens Organisational Learning and Adaptability