Another topic that came up at the conference was the issue of blame and responsibility. How do you react, when a situation is all your fault? Or when somebody accuses you of it? We talked about it, and a thought came to me: There are a few differences between blame and responsibility.

Blame is looking back, responsibility is looking forward. If I blame you, it’s about something that’s already happened. If I give you responsibility for something, that means the outcome is still uncertain.

Blame means you’re essentially powerless. It’s done, it’s in the past, all you can do now is argue about whether or not it’s your fault. Responsibility means you have the power to change things.

But perhaps the most important difference to me, is that blame can be divided, whereas responsibility can’t. If something bad happens, it can be 50% my fault and 50% yours. If we have a shared responsibility for something, we both have 100% responsibility. Acting as if you can pass around shares of responsibility has some weird consequeces. In my thinking, 10 people working on the same project all have 100% responsibility.

This reminds me of a story I heard once, of the CEO of a danish company who went around in the organization taking the blame. Whenever there was a conflict or a crisis, he’d step in and say “It’s my fault”, leaving his people free to work out solutions. He took the blame, they got the responsibility.

One of the things that came up in the discussion at the democratic CEO round table was the apparent paradox, that a democratic organization needs a strong leader. You’d think that the whole idea of democratic organizations, would be to eliminate the need for strong leaders so that everyone could lead according to their interests and passion. In practice this is not the case, as evidenced by the experience of those present at the round table.

I came up with the idea, that the strong leader is necessary not to make actual business, but rather to keep the democracy alive and healthy. The one thing, that is not up for the vote in a democratic organization, is whether or not to be democratic. And since the transition to democracy and the practice of democracy once you’re there is untried and can be confusing, frustrating and difficult (in addition, of course, to being fun, dynamic and energizing), someone needs to hold on strongly to the democratic principles and values.

That got me thinking about a model I came up with a couple of years ago – heavily inspired by some work in NLP, namely that at any given time, you can operate on three levels:
* Values
* Process
* Production

The lowest level is production. This is where things actually get done, and if you never spend time there, all your efforts will come to nothing. The middle level, process, is when you work on how you produce, eg. having a meeting to decide how to organize your work. The top level is values, and here you identify and strengthen the values and principles which shape the way you work.

A strong democratic leader then, is one who is active in the middle level of democracy, ie. the principles. He will not make decisions at the production level, those are made democratically. But he or she will operate at the process level, to ensure that democracy is practiced and kept alive, according to the values of the company.