Why Most “Accountability” Processes Fail

Have you noticed how obsessed conscious culture-change communities have become with “holding each other accountable?”

I have. Almost every person who reaches out to me for conflict facilitation support, at some point in our first conversation, says they want the other person to be held accountable for their actions or inactions.

But here’s the thing about accountability: We can’t hold anyone to it.

Because by definition, accountability is an internal process and commitment. We can’t do it for someone else, even with the use of force, were we to decide to use it. We can punish someone for what they did. We can cancel or banish them. We can shame them and tell them their actions were wrong. We can demand change. We can make them so frightened and uncomfortable that they perform learning and repair to get out of the hot seat. But we can’t actually make it happen.

When someone in our community has done something that rises to the level of group intervention, it’s because they have some significant limitations (as we all do, some more impactful than others). These can included: blindness to their own power or privilege, ignorance, systemic factors including toxic socialization, making agreements that aren’t within capacity to uphold, blind spots that make it challenging for them to accurately predict impacts. And when they inevitably show these same limitations within the context of an accountability process, and WE don’t have the skill to help them see them and work with them, we throw up our hands and say they’re beyond help.

Even the most committed activists, peace-loving hippies and other conscious folk who are fully committed to the idea of dismantling patriarchy fall into its powerful and magnetic grooves of moralistic judgment, blame, intolerance and vengeance in the aftermath of big ruptures or harm. We assign intentions to the person’s actions that don’t feel accurate to them, which blocks our ability to find shared reality about what happened (see: “you abused your power”, “you manipulated her”, “she betrayed me,” “He was grooming her.”). We go into accountability processes already having decided that what the other person did was objectively “wrong”. We expect the person at the center of the process to agree with all of our mistrustful judgments about them and are shocked and indignant when they don’t. And because most of us haven’t been trained to differentiate between observations and narratives but we have been trained to see the world through the lens of right/wrong thinking, we struggle to create the scaffolding and soft energetics for accountability to germinate, grow, and possibly blossom into authentic and lasting transformation. Is this easy to do in instances of serious impacts, violence and other forms of harm? Fuck no it isn’t easy. But it is possible.

We really have two options here:

We can fight this inconvenient mirror - and most of us, including many facilitators, do. We can say that it’s not our job to do the labor of helping someone see their power and privilege. We can tell them they need to “do their work.” We can throw tantrums about all the ways we think they “should” be showing up to the process.

Or we can ask ourselves:

“What, exactly, is our goal here?”

“What gives us the best chance at achieving it?”

“If we aren’t able to achieve it, is there a way to hold the tragedy of our collective failure in togetherness with this person, even if we don’t see a path to staying in relationship with them right now?”

Because what I see again and again with rupture is that underneath the patriarchal conditioning we’ve absorbed which makes cancellation, call-outs and judgment our knee-jerk moves after impacts happen, what we actually want is for people to truly get the pain their actions contributed to, care about the pain, and be willing to change. And this is where we can place our attention. This is what we can commit ourselves to supporting, especially when the stakes are very high.

Accountability, if we desire someone to fully “take” it, is something that requires a tremendous amount of collective patience, love, trust in the person’s innate wholeness and potential to change, and a fuck-ton of support.

I’m interested in contributing to a world where many more people have the skills and capacities to hold radical non-judgment and love at the center of restorative community processes.

Are you interested in this too?