Fool Me Twice

A few things crossed my news feed over the last week that, on the surface, had nothing to do with each other. 

Among them was a piece by Paul Hogendoorn (MA - September - October 2026 by annexbusinessmedia - Issuu) comparing how manufacturers operate versus how governments operate, with a clear focus on accountability. 

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation recommended $60 billion in Government cuts in the upcoming budget, including ceasing funding for organizations such as the CBC and Canada Post, and lastly, the flurry of municipal signs cropping up with the upcoming local elections and everyone’s promise to make things better (more services, lower taxes, more growth, etc.)

Three unrelated stories. And for me, the same question kept surfacing underneath all of them.

Do governments really believe in accountability, or is it just words?

To see where this is going, let me start with a simple definition.  Accountability, by most standards, is an individual's or organization's obligation to take full ownership of their actions. They must transparently measure performance against goals and accept the consequences of the final outcomes.

As a point of comparison, as it will come up later, I consider responsibility the obligation to execute specific tasks, duties, or roles assigned to a position.

Responsibility is at the front end of execution; accountability is at the tail end.

I run an operations consulting practice, so I spend most of my working life asking that exact question inside businesses. Who owns this? What did we say we'd deliver? Did we deliver it? If not, why not, and what are we changing? It's not a punitive exercise; rather, it’s just how organizations stay honest with themselves. So, when I saw these stories back-to-back, I couldn't help but see the pattern. I was looking at government the way I look at a client's operating system, and frankly, it wasn’t a pretty picture (and, to be honest, over the 40 years I’ve followed politics, it never has been).

A quick, and I promise brief, history lesson

I'm not a historian by any means (my degree's in physics, so take this with the appropriate grain of salt), but early government didn't spring up to run our lives. It showed up to coordinate things that individuals and small groups genuinely couldn't manage alone. Basic Law.  Defense. Water and land allocation. The Code of Ur-Nammu (yes, I had to look this up) 😊, roughly 2100 BC, is the oldest surviving law code, and it's mostly about settling disputes fairly, not administering a society.  Government existed to solve coordination problems too big for any one household to solve on its own.

That's the whole history lesson. The point isn't that ancient Mesopotamia had it all figured out; it's that the original job was narrow and specific, which likely made it easier to keep to those commitments.

A different standard

I've spent years helping businesses build values, and mine center on Humility, Drive, Smarts, and Versatility. But underneath Drive sits something more fundamental, something I wrote about years ago on a much smaller scale, and it is still a weekly (if not daily) theme: the importance of both responsibility and accountability.

You can hand someone responsibility without ever creating ownership. You can demand accountability from someone who never actually accepted the responsibility in the first place. That gap is where organizations start to fail (and finger-point and create silos).  You get the picture.

In business, we build entire systems to close that gap. Weekly reviews. Quarterly targets. KPIs that connect what we said we'd do to what happened. Miss a target long enough, and someone eventually must explain the variance, out loud, to people who can make you feel very uncomfortable if they see holes in your explanation (or an entirely fabricated story, but that’s a different subject).

The government's accountability loop is an election approximately every four years, for an entire term's worth of decisions. Picture running a business where leadership is evaluated only every four years. You could make a commitment, miss it, make a new one, miss that too, blame circumstances, and ask to be judged on a four-week campaign of new promises instead of the actual four-year track record. No board in the world lets you get away with that. We just call it politics and move on.

Why this actually matters if you run a business

Every dollar of debt a government takes on today doesn’t get paid by the people making the decision. It gets paid by us, our kids, and maybe our grandkids, people who have zero say in a commitment being made on their behalf. That isn’t policy; rather, it’s a broken ownership (or leadership) chain. It's the same one I often diagnose in family businesses where the current generation makes a decision the next generation gets stuck living with.

If you ran your company the way most governments run themselves, spending against a plan nobody's measuring, money you don’t have with no timeline for an ROI, missing commitments without consequence, pushing the bill to whoever is left owning the org chart later, you wouldn't have a business in four years, let alone four decades.

So how do we make things different, and hopefully better?  It’s not about political leaning or party preference.  Canadian history is full of politicians, most with good intent, who lose their way and end up serving themselves or their party rather than the people they represent.  We’re part of the problem too; we get mesmerized by the shiny red object (new service, new investment, a tax cut) and follow along without asking whether it’s actually needed.  We weigh ‘want’ versus ‘need’ in our own households every day.  Shouldn’t we apply that same scrutiny at the ballot box?

Here’s where I’d start.  Vote out leaders and parties who don’t keep their promises.  Push for accountability and responsibility at every level of government, not just the federal one.  Allow a margin of error; we all miss some goals, but like a Balanced Scorecard, ask government to focus on the critical few instead of the critical few thousand.  I’d rather hear an honest, tough picture from a candidate than a dishonest, rosy one.  Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me.

Where this leaves me

What I keep coming back to is fairly obvious, and it's not just a platform for politicians; it's a standard for anyone who calls themselves a leader. Do what you say you're going to do. Measure whether you did it. Own it when you didn't. That's the standard I hold myself to, the standard I build into every operating system I help a client design, and it shouldn't be a crazy thing to ask of the institutions managing the most important parts of our lives.

If you're a business owner reading this, here's the actual takeaway. Go look at your own operating rhythm this week. Where are you demanding accountability without real ownership? Fix that one first. I promise it's easier than fixing Parliament, and you'll actually see results before the next election.