Where did that concern go? Run the dye test on your organisation
Hydrologists have a lovely trick. When they want to know where an underground stream ends up, they tip fluorescent dye into a sinkhole and watch which spring turns green. Sometimes the water surfaces kilometres away. Sometimes it never surfaces at all.
I would like you to run the same test on your organisation.
Pick one concern that was raised in good faith in the last quarter. Not a gripe about the coffee... a substantive, evidenced worry about a program, a cost, a timeline. You can probably think of one. Now trace it. Which meeting absorbed it? Whose action list did it land on? Did it ever reach someone with the authority to change the decision it was about, in a form that still had its teeth?
If you cannot find where it surfaced, you have just located what Dan Davies calls an 'accountability sink': a structure that absorbs consequences and feedback so thoroughly that nothing travels back to the people who made the original call. The unsettling part is that nobody rejected the concern. A rejection would at least leave a trace, a decision someone owns. Absorption leaves nothing. The concern simply stops existing, and six months later everyone is surprised by a problem that was described, in writing, by someone three levels down.
In my latest article I look at how these sinks get built (rarely out of malice, mostly out of structure), why the standard change program playbook can quietly become one, and what to do from both altitudes: the senior leader who can redesign the plumbing, and the mid-layer professional who carries accountability for outcomes they had no hand in shaping.
This is also the territory where a thinking partner earns its keep. I built Pragma to work through exactly these structural questions, in my tone, at whatever depth the moment demands. If you are curious what that looks like in practice, the FAQ covers how leaders are using it, from a one-off jam through to ongoing advisory.
One caution before you run the dye test: be ready for the answer. The dye disappears more often than anyone expects, and the organisations most confident in their 'open door' cultures are often the ones with the deepest sinks... visible doors, invisible plumbing.
Read the full article, including the NBN and Robodebt case studies and the practical moves for each altitude: Feel like it's all responsibility without authority? Someone designed your job this way.