The concept of responsibility

1. Message 6The concept of responsibility
Responsibility, in our context, is understood as the individual and
organisational ability of responding actively to perceived questions
and problems. Accepting responsibility is the aim of learning and
working together. People, organisations, networks assuming respon-
sibility of their tasks, situations and perspectives are the actual out-
come asked for by organisational learning. Individual and collective
responsibility is at the very centre of all sustainability in organisa-
tional development.
Leading people to responsibility is the main objective of facilitating.
People who are responsible or perceive themselves as sharers of a
common responsibility, be it in an organisation or a network of or-
ganisations, will contribute more actively to asking the right ques-
tions and searching for viable answers to them. Sharing responsibility
defines the difference between communities of practice and com-
munities of performance.
Appropriation, making my own what I have learned, is the aim of all
action learning processes. Responsibility is the attitude resulting
from such learning. Creating responsibility, making it grow in indi-
viduals and groups or whole organisations is the essential task of
managers who want to act as leaders. Here is where facilitating and
leading coincide.
Facilitators have only a methodical and procedural responsibility of
the output of processes they have engaged in to lead to certain re-
sults and objectives. They have no power but the power of the rules
accepted or established by the participants of such a process. But it
is the participants who have to take over the responsibility of im-
plementing and executing the tasks as they were defined and ac-
cepted.
Managers have a full responsibility including the planning, the exe-
cution of the plan and its results. But they need people, groups of
people or individuals, who take over tasks in the prosecution of a
plan. In order to make these people do their job, managers have the
choice to use power in order to make people do something or to act
as a facilitator of common planning and working in order to make
people understand and motivate them to do things properly from
their own impulse and will. It is absolutely necessary to be aware of
this choice as it establishes something like a micro-climate of co-
operation among the people you work with.
Cf. Message 9:
Communities of
practice and self-
organisation
11.09.2008, 13:28:33

2. 2/2
Being a manager, you can force people to work, but you cannot
force them to work well, at least not in the long run. In order to
work well, they must be able to do it, willing to do it and allowed to
do it.
You can force peo-
ple to work. But you
cannot force them
to work well.
• Able means, they must have learned to do it, they must be com-
petent to do it properly; and they need adequate tools and ma-
terials to fulfil a task properly.
The concept of
competence is ex-
plained in
Message 5:
Basic concepts of
learning and compe-
tence
• Willing means, they must want to contribute to shared objectives
by fulfilling their task properly. But it also means they must feel
a personal need to master a task according to certain levels of
quality instead of being mastered by the task.
• Allowed to do means, the organisation they work in must provide
sufficient space of freedom for taking the corresponding deci-
sions.
If this general assumption is true for managers, the more it applies
to facilitators who by definition cannot order people to do anything.
They must motivate and win them. There must be some perceived
advantage for them to do it, completing a mission, making a valu-
able contribution to something relevant to them, if possible, some-
thing creating (also) personal satisfaction. Facilitators have no other
way to create responsibility.