InfoQ Book Review: The Responsibility Virus

It's been said before: good process won't fix a bad team. But why are some teams and organizations more difficult than others? In this InfoQ book review Deborah Hartmann suggests that the wall we're banging our heads against may be created by what author Roger Martin calls The Responsibility Virus, a pernicious infection running on fear which undermines nominal efforts to work more collaboratively. Martin agrees with what many Agile coaches also teach: a change of attitude is essential to the success of our efforts to become more collaborative, and this extends out into the wider organization of which the team is a living part. With its practical thinking tools, which can be gradually applied, The Responsibility Virus: How Control Freaks, Shrinking Violets and the Rest of Us Can Harness the Power of True Partnership will be of particular interest to coaches, change agents and others working to sow organisational change, whether that work focuses up, down or across the corporate org chart.

(c) Roger Martin

Roger Martin, Dean of the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, is a Harvard MBA and previously directed Monitor Company, a US strategy consulting firm, where he also established Monitor University. During his long career in corporate consulting, Martin realized that poor decision-making, even when endemic in an organization, actually began at the level of individual behaviour. Framed in this way, the Virus no longer is simply "their problem," but rather it is something in which we are all complicit.

One thing that makes the book interesting is its assertion that it really does "take two to tango", and that treatment of the Virus only requires that one party "stop dancing" by using the simple Responsibility Virus tools in conversation. The tools address both the over-responsible and the under-responsible party, and can be applied from either end of the dynamic to start shifting interactions toward true collaboration. Though Martin suggests that the tools can be most powerful when used openly by a whole team, the tools can also be quietly applied by individuals in individual conversations.

Read the InfoQ book review: The Responsibility Virus Helps Fear Undermine Collaboration, by Deborah Hartmann.