Accountability and ownership

I was on a workshop 2 weeks back with one of our customers, planning to launch agile in a big way and this interesting thought on accountability came in.

Being involved in agile way of working for the last 4-5 years, I am connected to many agile practitioners in the organization I work for. One of the Agile consultants suggested me to get involved in this workshop. Since I am passionate about agile, I was excited to get involved in this exercise.

The workshop was for 3 days and I would not be available for my team.  I am pretty confident that my team will manage during my absence. I also thought I could spare an additional 2-3 hours on my work in case required. This was the balancing game I planned when I committed my availability.

Agenda was Day 1, 2 to work and conclude on various practices, approaches to be considered, Day 3 was to come up with an integrated approach of overall way of working.

Day 1 went great with lots of discussions and contributions. Day 2, towards 3:00pm we were almost done and there was no specific role for me. However there was dinner planned that evening along with all participants. I was not very eager on the food part and thoughts about work back with my team was creating conflicts in my mind. So I decided to leave. I updated the team(workshop) and left for the day, went back to work and attended pending work.

Later that day, I could see something was disturbing me. (I have this habit of reflecting each day, how it went and I could realize something was not right). Pondering for some time I understood the actual cause. I should not have left the workshop without concluding for the day. Though I did update the team before I left, later I concluded, my decision to leave was not right. It was like not taking complete ownership and leaving the work half done. This thought created a big void and I felt quite disturbed. I realized my big mistake J

Accountability is about taking complete ownership and ensuring that activity picked is brought to conclusion in all respect. It is about DONE DONE.