If everyone is responsible, no one is responsible

Humans are a strange breed. Not really good at collective responsibility.

I hope we have been programmed like the bees or ant colonies have evolved into. But we are not. The unwritten encode rules in these insects drive their collective behavior adapting to hive and colony changes as the situation demands. Neither are we geese which rotate taking the lead based on the coded strength patterns to the benefit of the collective.

Therefore for humans to function as a collective on common ownership of responsibility is to clearly articulate a simple set of pre-agreed rules on how the collective responsibility will be instantiated in specific circumstances in order to become individual responsibility to do something. And have a mechanism to update and evolve these simple rules.

Lack of such understanding leads to heartburn, lopsided distribution of tasks, pressure on the doers who do things, lack of learning on people who don’t put the effort to pick up the pieces, lazers (like me) not pulling their weight, getting away with the minimum, not volunteering enough, assumptions that someone will do it.

Too many chefs in the kitchen!

Whether one works in a group, a team, or a family unit, the collective responsibility needs to be broken down into specific responsibilities in order to act. This could be by dividing the work into smaller pieces that a singular person would take responsibility for. Optionally for repeating tasks, one could volunteer for a specific instance of such action.

All the same irrespective of how the work is sliced or diced, a pre-agreed approach to sharing the ownership of responsibility needs to be there in order for humans to work as a team, unit, or family. And requires an environment of “give and take” and collective cognizance of a balance of distribution of this work across the participants. There is no excuse for not doing this.