Beardens' Blog

Accountability - Choice & Consequences

 I’ve started this series of articles with the following premise: The potential for success does not disappear just because the requirements for success change. What that means is that even in the current economic/financial climate, the potential for individual and organizational success is there. In order to recognize and capitalize on that potential, we must be willing to consider and try alternatives to the status quo. One component of the status quo that bears scrutiny is our perspective.

 

Here’s my spin on perspective:

 

 

Answers to the following question provide examples of perspectives at work: What does it mean to be 60? I’m sure that you’d agree that it pretty much depends on “where you’re looking at 60 from”. For most people under the age of fifty-five, it probably means “old”. For people in their 60’s and beyond, it probably means “young”. It’s the same number, used in the same context and being viewed at the same time by different people; and the different meanings they assign relate to their different perspectives.

 

That same phenomenon is playing out in today’s uncertain economic times. The reactions of different people and organizations reflect the different perspectives they’ve used for processing the circumstances they’ve encountered. Some of them “hunker and hope”, while others look for ways to win.

 

And that brings us back to perspective. The two different approaches to dealing with adversity correspond to what I see as the two most common perspectives being used. Those two perspectives are Victimhood and Accountability, and it seems to me that Victimhood is the more popular.

 

At the beginning of this entry I said that in order to recognize and capitalize on the potential for success that exists—even in troubling times—we must be willing to consider and try alternatives to the status quo. If the Victimhood perspective is the status quo, then the alternative we might consider is Accountability.

 

I’ll be sharing more of my thoughts about the distinctions between these two perspectives, and I’ll end this entry with my definition of Accountability. It goes like this:

 

Accountability

Acknowledged ownership of the choices we make

And of the consequences those choices produce.

ALL the choices and ALL of the consequences

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