This post is the third in a mini-series about making use of difficult times. First, we discussed handling the difficult feelings that can arise. Next, we talked about limiting your scope of information intake and forming your own researched opinion about things that are really important to you. To wrap up, let’s talk about accountability. As in, how do you account for your own and other peoples’ contributions to a situation?

It’s hard to know how to hold people accountable unless it’s modeled for you or you have training. Even something as uncomplicated as how to hold your own self accountable can be difficult. I’m operating with the assumption that most people want to be accountable to themselves and their communities. And most of the time, I think we are accountable, well enough that no mention is made of it and no thought is given to it.

Accountability to Self

But wait – how many times recently have you thought of your own behavior (or lack of it), “I really should do . . .” So perhaps being accountable to ourselves is somewhat difficult. People who have thought about this problem much more often and smartly say to set up your environment so that your ideal behavior arises naturally from it. Make your desired behavior the easiest thing to do. Make it the course of action that requires the least amount of thought. As an example, check out Matt Might’s blog entry about doing pullups regularly to gain muscle strength. He applies the same philosophy to bulking up, losing weight, and working efficiently. It basically amounts to putting in the thought, time, and money up front to radically restructure your environment so that it prompts you to default to your desired behavior.

He also discusses measuring, tracking, and reporting outcomes of your behavior. For the projects he mentions in his blog, this could mean counting calories, weighing yourself, or measuring your waistline. Getting regular feedback from an objective, quantified source about effects of your behavior. Charting your progress over time to see how well your environment is working for you.

So it seems to me that there are four components to Dr. Might’s method of holding oneself accountable:

• Defining the goal or desired behavior. The definition must be clear and precise, so that you can track your performance and be confident about whether or not you are meeting your goal.
• Setting up your environment so that the desired behavior is the easiest and most natural of all possible choices. That means removing obstacles to the behavior (or confronting limiting fears about engaging in the behavior). And it also means erecting barriers or linking negative outcomes to the other, undesired behaviors.
• Going about your daily life without putting unnecessary or repetitive thought into it. Being an academic, Matt Might likes to reserve his thinking resources for original thoughts in service of his field of study. But this thriftiness is probably what makes his strategy so durable – most people want to avoid the exhaustion of needlessly taxing their mental resources.
• Regularly receiving objective, quantified feedback about how well you are meeting your goal or the progress you are making toward it. This component assumes you’ve already set up some sort of tracking or logging system, presumably as part of your environmental structuring described above. Now you would be assessing your performance regularly, which will let you know whether your environmental design is working for you or whether you need to make changes.

I think this system can work for quantifiable goals where the criteria are objective, the tracking of them is not subject to significant bias, and the tracking can be done by yourself. However, it’s possible to have all these components in place and still fail. For example, if something about the environment gets derailed, it can distract you or thwart your goal. And even if you are tracking your progress, you may find yourself carefully and precisely tracking how you routinely fail to progress toward your goal. So what next?

Accountability to Others

Let’s talk about accountability to others. There are several scenarios where we may be accountable to others, ranging from behaviors that directly affect them to goals that aren’t related to them at all. As an example of the latter, let’s continue with our scenario from above. What can you do if you’ve set up your environment to encourage your desired behavior and have tracked your progress faithfully only to find you’re nowhere near your goal?

Having a friend to whom you answer can help with your motivation. It may also provide an opportunity for your friend to informally coach you as you check in about your activity and what factors influence the chances of you meeting your goal each day (or period between check-ins). And, if your friend has a similar personal goal, you may choose to work side-by-side for some goals, making the experience more fun.

So far, I’ve talked about involving someone of your choice, voluntarily, in holding you accountable for a behavior that doesn’t necessarily matter to them. They may care about it for your sake, but if you fail to meet your goal, it’s not going to have much of an effect on them. What I really want to focus on in this section is something a bit more complicated: being accountable to others for behavior that affects them, for which they are far more likely to care about.

The four points above, as discussed for personal goals that don’t involve other people, will be slightly altered in this section to accommodate the necessary interpersonal dynamics.

The first component, defining the goal or desired behavior, may arise out of the expectations of any of the involved persons. I would already have expectations of myself, for how I treat other people or behave around them. These expectations would be based on my values, my environment, my perception of my role in relation to the other persons. The other person would also have expectations of me, also based on our environment, their culture, their knowledge of my culture, their perception of our roles in the context of our relationship. Our mutual expectations may align well without overt discussion, or perhaps we would take an opportunity early in our relationship to define them. If we met in the context of a formal group, the group may provide expectations or may create a defined opportunity for us to set expectations.

Setting up the environment to encourage the desired behavior or relationship dynamics may be more complicated in this situation. Although, if you are part of a formal group or other structure, they may already provide some of that – regular meetings, resources, a work environment, etc. Plus the motivation to visit that environment or use those resources regularly – a salary, acknowledgement, social connection, etc.

The last component, tracking progress or getting feedback, can be more subjective and difficult to implement constructively. It can get us into trouble in ways that just don’t happen when we track our independent goals – like the difference between stepping on a weigh scale and conducting an annual performance review.

In structured groups such as a workplace or lab, it makes sense to institute a formal goal-setting and feedback-giving & receiving routine. This is standard procedure in corporate environments, which often also train their employees in how to conduct these routines constructively.

I’ve worked in five different academic labs as well as one corporation, and I never experienced anything remotely similar to that in academia. I imagine that the administrative levels do and that specific labs might, but I haven’t been aware of resources or encouragement of specific labs to do that nor of a way for the administration or the higher levels of academia to create a standard mechanism for the students to participate in this at the level of, say, their department or school (except for unions, which some schools have and which do sometimes create feedback opportunities, and faculty meetings where specific student reps are named, invited, and supported – but other students are not always aware of the governance nor the way to operate within the structure to give and receive feedback). I consider this a cultural issue with serious implications for the health of academia, which we’ll cover more in a future post.

In other situations or in less formal arrangements such as a roommate chore sheet or a team agreement about workout routines, it makes sense to agree on a “check-in” routine to track progress and possibly also a date at which to review whether the goal or arrangement still makes sense. Start with an informal, verbal agreement for lower-stakes behaviors. For ideas about giving and receiving feedback smoothly, there are many books that can help, including Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication, as well as several books written by members of the Harvard Negotiation Project, including Getting to Yes, and Thanks for the Feedback.

Accountability to the Past

This part is related to accountability to yourself. It’s takes the concepts of accountability we discussed above and relates it back to what prompted this post in the first place – how we can get the best out of difficult situations and grow from them. Once we have dealt with the feelings arising from them and formed our opinion based on our experience and any research or deep-diving we did according to our own values and priorities, what do we do next?

It’s worth contemplating what made the situation difficult – did it reveal something about our own values or attitudes that we now want to change, or did it involve a difficult person who we just can’t avoid, or was it indicative of some entrenched problem that seems unsolvable or out of our control? One can mine the situation for motivation to change or grow in some way, or perhaps to develop a personal mission or adjust our values and priorities. Formal teams or organizations often do a “lessons learned” exercise after these situations are discovered, in which they analyze each person or party’s contribution to the situation and determine whether new policies need to be added (or existing ones altered) to prevent the situation from recurring.

You can do this individually for difficult situations in your life as well. Do it soon after the situation if you want ideas for personal policies or routines that you wish to change. Give it some distance (in time and context) if you want are looking to change your values, perspective, or if you want to use the difficulty to as some sort of calling in life. Just remember, when looking back on distant situations that give you cause for regret, that the you in that situation is not the you thinking about it now. You can’t recreate your mind at the time with the mind you have now – the limited information and experience you had back then versus all the new research and living you’ve done since the event occurred. So remember not to be too hard on your past self – given your limitations at the time, there probably wasn’t much else you could have done. If you can look back on a distant situation in the past with horror or shock at how badly you navigated it, that is one way of marking how much progress you have made since then in educating yourself or realigning your values. If you make it through both the nearsighted and farsighted forms of analysis and are still feeling moved by some aspect of your experience, it’s more likely to be a legitimate calling for you.

For all of these forms of accountability – to yourself, to others, to your past – it can be a source of real growth if taken seriously. And if you are able to separate your view of yourself from your view of your behavior, it can even be enjoyable.