CONCEPT
Cumulative Responsibility
Follett's alternative to the illusion of final authority — authority distributed across the organization in proportion to situated knowledge, with decisions emerging through integration of multiple authoritative perspectives.
Mary Parker Follett's alternative to the illusion of final authority. Cumulative responsibility distributes authority across the organization in proportion to the knowledge each member possesses about the aspects of the situation for which she is responsible. The engineer has authority over engineering dimensions, the designer over design dimensions, the customer service representative over customer-experience dimensions. No single person has final authority, because no single person possesses final knowledge. The decision emerges from the integration of multiple authoritative perspectives, each rooted in situated knowledge the others cannot provide. This is not governance by committee — which Follett regarded as dysfunctional — but a structural alternative to hierarchy that the AI age makes both more achievable and more urgent.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Cumulative responsibility is not governance by committee, which Follett regarded as merely distributing the illusion of final authority among a group. Committee governance remains bounded by members' collective limitations, and the political dynamics of committee deliberation — compromises, logrolling, suppression