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Accountability sinks | A Working Library

Once you start looking for accountability sinks, you see them all over the place. When your health insurance declines a procedure; when the airline cancels your flight; when a government agency declares that you are ineligible for a benefit; when an investor tells all their companies to shovel so-called AI into their apps. Everywhere, broken links between the people who face the consequences of the decision and the people making the decisions.

I’m thinking about how accountability sinks might operate in my context, the local church. Sometimes you get opposing sinks: the pastor concludes the church doesn’t move forward because of the stubbornness of the laity; the laity conclude the
pastor is to blame; everyone escapes accountability as the community degrades. The consequences, though, are much harder to discern in this case.

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Pluralistic: Keeping a suspense file gives you superpowers (26 Oct 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

This is not an imposition, it’s a kindness. The point of a suspense file isn’t to nag others into living up to their commitments, it’s to form a network of support among collaborators where we all help one another make those conscious choices about what we’re not going to do, rather than having the stuff we really value slip away because we forgot about it.

This is important…I’ve often wondered about good boundaries around reminding other people of their obligations. Should I send out a reminder email about the meeting, or assume we’re all adults? Instead of seeing it though through the expectation of perfection, if I admit that we all need help (this is why I have a Getting Things Done system after all), reminding others turns into a collaborative system in which we’re all trying to do our best.