The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - and How The World Lost its Mind

The second I heard this phrase, I knew I had to read this book: “What you have is an outcome that nobody wanted, but that the system was specifically designed to produce”.If you’ve worked in corporate America for at least a couple decades, you’ve no doubt discovered many of the symptoms. You may have even mastered the ability to determine exactly what employees / groups are incentivized to do by observing their output.What this book gives the reader is the “why” behind the current malaise of modern capitalism and corporations. The concept of accountability sinks is brilliantly fleshed out in this book. The POSIWID idea, and the black box concepts of complex systems is something most do not comprehend. This book describes these ideas and the concept of cybernetics, and its history.Truly a must read book for anyone who is wondering why everyone has lost their minds, and what to do about it.

This book, in principle, had all I love: complexity theory (Arthur et al.), fragility (Taleb), fractality (Mandelbrot), management (Toyota et al.), the State (Scott et al.), the agent-principal problem (Taleb et al, again)... and, at the helm, a former Bank of England's economist and financial analyst who's lived the Leviathan not only to tell it, but to pull the trigger from inside.And tell he does: 2/3 of the book dives deep in the history of cybernetics, its protagonists and attempts to become applied science. Great stuff.However, Davies fails to meet (is that unfair of me saying that or all readers' reviews have to be this subjective and unfair?) what I believe was a huge opportunity of tackling not just one, but both "machines": the public one (the State) and the private one (the Market, Capitalism or Big Finance, you name it). Instead, unable to hide his very obvious political views, he goes hard on one side of the spectrum and just one quadrant of that side, leaving way too much meat on the bone for the reader to be left wandering, unsatisfied, sighing in vain.My only hope is, as the smart and young a writer he is, he will not stop at this. Following on Taleb's footsteps, he will find the courage to blame the "unblameable" (say fraud!), he will uncover larger and deeper unaccountability sinks and, ultimately, he will come up with more robust solutions for a system (multiverse of systems?) that, as imperfect as it is, is also hungry for novel, unproven and striking unfolding(s). Game on.

This elegant and well-written book explains how big businesses have set up a horrid system in which you the consumer can never get satisfaction. What a fabulous book! Easy to read, clear explanations. Doesn't get better than this. Read and feel empowered.

This was an incredibly well-researched read - I felt like I got to know Stafford Beer personally while reading it. Understandably the thesis of the argument takes a fair amount of time to set up, but then the conclusion is elegantly simple and thought-provoking. I did however find that the purely cybernetic approach that completely discounts the agency of individuals involved in systems to be lacking and ironically brushes aside the true complexity of the task at hand when attempting to redesign systems to deliver more universal benefit. Stafford Beer's approach is certainly useful, but doesn't address the deeper dimensions of motivation that drive the human experience.That however doesn't take anything away from the book - a fantastic read.

This is probably the first book I’ve read about the malaise of the last 16 years that has a satisfying analysis. While reading this, I couldn’t stop thinking of how the businesses and governments agencies maximizing whatever metric they settled for were like an anorexic starving themselves to while happily watching the number go down on their scale. Dan Davies shows how all sorts of information problems can be solved by going insane. If we are going to avoid that, we’ll have to find a way to live with complexity. Davies describes an exciting solution based on cybernetics and the fractal systems it defines. You need to read this book.

Great book

A wide-ranging discussion of why no one in modern life seems to be accountable for anything - with consideration of algorithms, modern-day organization design, the benefits and limitations of economics as a way of viewing the world, and the inimitable British thinker Stafford Beer. And Davies can be very funny as well, with asides like "ignorance is a kind of information-processing system of last resort." Highly recommended.

Il libro tratta fondementalmente i sistemi complessi e i loro problemi. Nella priima parte parla della responsabilità all'interno delle organizzazioni:qualsiasi organizzazione, in una moderna società industriale, tenderà a ristrutturarsi in modo da ridurre la quantità di responsabilità personale attribuibile alle sue azioni creando i cosiddetty accountability sink. Poi passa a illustrare i fondamenti della cibernetica, ci sono cinque funzioni fondamentali in un sistema e se una di queste manca o non ha risorse sufficienti, il flusso di informazioni non sarà bilanciato dalla capacità di elaborarla. Le informazioni contano solo se vengono fornite in una forma in cui possono essere tradotte in azioni, e questo significa che devono arrivare abbastanza rapidamente. I sistemi preservano la loro vitalità affrontando i problemi il più possibile allo stesso livello in cui arrivano, ma devono anche avere canali di comunicazione che attraversino più livelli di gestione, per gestire grandi shock. Passa poi ad una critica della economia e degli economisti, in particolare gli economisti creano dei modelli caratteristici dell'economia eliminando quasi tutta la complessità e fanno un sacco di ipotesi semplificatrici, spesso discutibili in termini di rilevanza empirica, inoltre agiscono come se le loro conclusioni fossero dimostrate nel mondo reale. Infine critica sia le teorie di Friedman e sia certe degenerazioni del management degli ultimi anni, con l'ossesione dei taglio dei costi quando diminuendo il personale e il middle management, si riducono le capacità cognitive delle organizzazioni. Coclude affermando che i sistemi in generale hanno bisogno di meccanismi per riorganizzarsi quando la complessità del loro ambiente diventa troppo difficile da sostenere, ma i sistemi di governo di alto livello del mondo industriale (politica economica e gestione aziendale) hanno mostrato alcuni difetti e punti ciechi che hanno impedito che ciò accadesse.In sintesi un libro che affronta molti argomenti, alcuni complessi, ma l'autore è molto bravo a rendere cose difficili in maniera gradevole da leggere e comprensibili che rende il libro molto leggibile. La recensione completa su: demo-critica-mente.blogspot.it

Unaccountability Sink - this is exactly what you would find in modern business and public services...If you are a company owner, or servant of the public entity or even government, or just a manager of any level - this is for you.Of course, you can polish you area and finetune you personal Unaccountability, or...Find a way how this problem could be addressed.And if you do not want to address "Unaccountability Sink" problem - it is a matter of time when your company or service will suffer significantly (as we see with some e.g. aviation manufactures today), and possibly you personally.This book is highly recommended to all who are in the management and/or lead e.g. projects, initiatives, units, companies.

Most often grand theories of “why the world is why it is” rely on bad-faith actors as the drivers of some malaise or other, or grossly simplify the human experience, or take some other shortcut which therefore doesn’t chime with my experience of life.Davies, instead, has managed to produce a wide ranging and entertainingly written book which left me nodding my head in agreement, or with jaw dropped in enlightenment at a concept I thought I knew and understood being looked at from a different and enlightening perspective. I think he nails his diagnosis of a lot of the problems we face.I potentially hoped for more time spent on how to fix organisations filled with “accountability sinks” but perhaps that’s my own challenge to face!Strong recommend.

An interesting thought provoker on some of the things business leaders need to understand and appreciate - intelligence systems, governance and causal connections wrapped with cybernetic thinking.

The book is very entertaining, and has definitely made me think differently when it comes to making decisions (and interpreting those made by a big system)