The Alibi of Certainty: Accountability and its Quiet Sabotage of Learning

There are words in organisational life that operate as articles of faith. ‘Accountability’ is one. It lands with a clean, hard sound, suggesting responsibility, ownership, a moral and operational tidiness. It promises a world of clear cause and effect. ‘Learning’ is another, softer and more hopeful, evoking progress, adaptation, the forward arc of evolution. We are told they are partners, the twin pillars of a resilient organisation. The accountable organisation, the story insists, is a learning organisation.

Yet, to observe these words in their natural habitat is to witness a colder, more complex relationship. It is less a partnership and more a quiet, protracted territorial dispute. In the daily currents of work, the gravitational pull of accountability, as it is commonly practiced, draws energy and oxygen away from the conditions required for genuine learning. They are not pulling in the same direction. They are, in fact, often tearing the same fabric apart. This is not a failure of intention but a fracture in perception, a misreading of the very ground on which an organisation stands.

The source of this fracture lies in the institutional denial of Unknowing. The modern organisation is an architecture of predictability, an elaborate attempt to rationalise and control an irrational and uncontrollable world. It is built on the assumption that with enough data, the right processes, and sufficient oversight, the future can be managed. Yet the reality of complex work is one of perpetual surprise. Projects derail, strategies falter, markets shift. These are not exceptions to be managed; they are the ambient conditions of existence. This chasm between the aspiration of control and the reality of uncertainty generates a deep, collective anxiety.

Accountability, in its most prevalent form, is a ritual designed to soothe this anxiety. It is an attempt to retrospectively impose a simple, linear plotline onto a messy, emergent event. When failure occurs, the urgent question is seldom “What does this reveal about our world and our assumptions?” but rather, “Who is responsible?” The post-mortem becomes a forensic exercise, a search not for systemic insight but for a locus of error, a person, a team, a decision, a place to terminate the unsettling chain of inquiry. This provides a cathartic, if illusory, resolution. An alibi for uncertainty has been found. The story has a villain, and the system can return to its fantasy of control, assured that the faulty part has been identified and will be corrected or removed.

Here, the force of Dynamics becomes visible, shaping the texture of daily work. Power is the capacity to impose a narrative. The formal structures of accountability, performance reviews, KPIs, stage-gate approvals, are not neutral instruments of measurement. They are political tools that define what is valuable, what is visible, and who holds the authority to pass judgment. This apparatus creates a powerful current that pulls all activity towards the shores of the predictable and the measurable, leaving the exploratory, inefficient, and often revelatory work of true adaptation stranded.

When these dynamics of control are marshalled against the anxiety of unknowing, a particular kind of organisational theatre is produced: the performance of certainty. In the meeting room, bad news is softened, risks are presented with pre-packaged mitigations, and doubt is cloaked in the language of confidence. To admit ignorance, to confess that a deadline is based on hope rather than evidence, is to paint a target on one’s back. It is to volunteer as the future subject of an accountability ritual. The system, therefore, does not reward those who are best at navigating uncertainty, but those who are most convincing in their performance of mastering it.

This performance recasts learning from a collective process of discovery into a private, remedial act. ‘Learning’ becomes the sentence handed down after a failure has been assigned. It is a consequence, not a continuous state of being. Yet real organisational learning, the kind that allows a system to co-evolve with its environment, requires the uninhibited flow of difficult information: data from the periphery, weak signals of change, and, most critically, the unvarnished truth about mistakes. An accountability system fixated on blame makes such honesty a profound personal risk. It incentivises the hoarding of information, the massaging of data, and the quiet burial of errors. The very intelligence the organisation most needs is systematically suppressed by its own immune response to uncertainty.

This exposes the critical role of Meaning. An organisation is not a machine; it is a community of interpretation, bound by the stories it tells itself. When faced with an unexpected outcome, the narrative that coalesces is everything. Is the story a tragedy of individual error, a simple morality play about who was negligent? Or is it a more complex tale of discovery, of an unexpected encounter with reality that reveals a flawed map or a deeper truth about the territory itself?

The accountability-as-blame model relentlessly generates the first kind of story. Its meaning is simple, resonant, and satisfyingly conclusive. A more systemic narrative is intellectually and emotionally demanding. It requires acknowledging that outcomes emerge from a dense web of interactions, incentives, and historical accidents. It means accepting that well-intentioned people can produce catastrophic results when operating within a flawed system. This story has no neat villain and offers no simple fix. It implicates the system itself, forcing the organisation to gaze into a mirror. The reflection is often disquieting.

To choose the story of systemic learning over individual blame is to choose ambiguity over false simplicity, and collective inquiry over the comfort of culpability. Yet the power dynamics of most organisations are not structured to support this choice. It is far easier to replace a person than to redesign the context that shaped their decisions. The meaning assigned to failure thus becomes the organisation’s true cultural signature, revealing what it truly values: the preservation of its fictions of control, or the difficult, ongoing work of seeing reality.

Ultimately, these forces of unknowing, dynamics, and meaning converge on the lived human experience of Belonging. To feel a part of a collective is to feel safe enough to be imperfect. It is to trust that membership is not contingent on flawless execution. Learning, at its heart, is an act of vulnerability, it is to ask a naive question, to float a half-formed idea, to admit a mistake. These are profound acts of social risk. They are only possible where the background condition is one of psychological safety, which is simply the felt sense of belonging.

An organisational climate governed by a search for culpability makes belonging fragile and conditional. The dominant emotional tone is not collaboration but a low-grade, ambient fear: fear of being the one caught out, of your project being the example, of your name being attached to the failure. This fear corrodes the relational trust necessary for learning. People retreat into defensive postures, managing impressions rather than tackling problems. Collaboration becomes a calculus of risk; honesty becomes a strategic decision.

In such a climate, the individual’s bond with the organisation becomes purely transactional. The primary goal is not to contribute to a collective endeavour, but to successfully navigate the accountability apparatus and remain blameless. The alternative is not an absence of responsibility, but a profoundly different kind of accountability, one rooted in a secure sense of belonging. This would be an accountability held by the group, for the system, not imposed on an individual by a hierarchy. It asks not "Who failed?" but "What can we learn from what happened?" and "How did we contribute to this outcome?" It is a shared commitment to staring into the abyss of unknowing, together.

The essential tension, then, is not between accountability and learning. It is between two fundamentally different cosmologies of work. One imagines a mechanical universe of levers, controls, and interchangeable parts, where failure is a defect to be engineered out of the system. In this world, accountability is the primary tool of quality control. The other imagines a complex, ecological universe, where the organisation is a living system in a constant dance of adaptation, and where failure is an inevitable, essential source of feedback. In this world, accountability is the communal practice of sensemaking.

We continue to build our organisations based on the first model, using the instruments of power and the simple narratives of blame to fortify our defences against the anxiety of a world we cannot control. In doing so, we create cultures of conditional belonging where the meaning of failure is threat, and the possibility of genuine learning withers. We get precisely the accountability we design for. If we design it as a search for the guilty, we will get fear, silence, and elegant stagnation. The learning we claim to value remains just over the horizon, a casualty of our own need for the alibi of certainty. The path towards an organisation that can learn does not begin with new training programmes, but with a more honest reckoning with the forces that prevent it. It begins with the courage to abandon our comforting maps and sit, for a moment, with the difficult, generative reality of the territory itself.