Designing Organisations That Work
15th September 2024
Nine chapters into his book The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies makes a little self-deprecatory joke. He had intended to write a detective mystery about cybernetics, he says, but has spent eight chapters describing the construction of the murder weapon.
The question that Davies starts out with is about how it is that the modern organisation has become structured in structured in such a way that when bad things happen, to customers, or users, or suppliers, no one can be found to be accountable for these poor outcomes.