Accountability as a Learning Loop

The line that kicked this off was something I came across on X from Henrique Dubugras (Brex):

"Consensus is cosplay for avoiding accountability."

Dramatic. Maybe too dramatic. But it stuck.

Consensus, in teams, often feels like the polite way to move forward. Everyone gets heard, no one is shut down, decisions feel shared. But the more I thought about it, the more I noticed the shadow side: sometimes when everyone agrees, no one owns what happens next. A decision gets made, but there is no person attached to its success or failure. And without that closeness, who learns from how it actually plays out?

Accountability, in my head, isn’t blame.
It’s not the label we apply when it breaks.

It sounds more like:

I pushed for this.
I will follow where it goes.
I will adjust when reality pushes back.

The clearest example from my own work is from ShareChat.
I pushed to move a huge ad sales team onto Salesforce because I wanted better revenue visibility and a way for Strategic Finance to support the business with cleaner forecasting. It was probably early for where the company was. It was definitely expensive in both money and time.

But I owned it.

I handled the migration pain.
I worked with the sales org on adoption.
I watched the dashboards and the misses and the friction.
When something broke, it was my problem to fix.
And because I could not walk away from it, I learned fast.

Some parts worked beautifully.
Some absolutely did not.
Both taught me something real.

And that is where the Henrique quote keeps echoing.

When ownership falls to someone purely because of hierarchy and not belief, the intensity drops. The feedback loop softens. Learning becomes second-hand instead of lived.

Maybe nothing collapses. Plenty of companies run fine like that. But the work loses a bit of sharpness. A bit of skin in the game.

The thought I keep circling:

Accountability only matters if it creates learning.
Otherwise it’s just names on a slide.