24 September 2011.  Just days after the shock announcement that UBS has identified and arranged the arrest of “rogue trader”, Kweku Adoboli, the news came through that UBS CEO Oswald Gruebel has stood down from his post.  The Bank’s chairman, Kaspar Villiger, said that Gruebel “feels it is his duty to assume responsibility for the recent unauthorised trading incident”.

I notice that my heart sinks when the response to failures in the public domain (in politics, or amongst public servants, or in highly visible senior roles in the commercial sector) is to let some senior head roll.  What does it mean to assume responsibility in this context – and others like it?  There are, clearly, two ways in which someone takes responsibility.  The first is to acknowledge some error that has enabled failures to happen.  This is taking responsibility for what has happened in the past.  There is also the question of who will address the underlying causes of an issue that has happened in the past or the systemic weaknesses that allowed it to occur.  This is taking responsibility for sorting out what happens in future.

It seems to me that when heads roll the people concerned perform a rather strange double face.  On the one hand, by falling on their swords, they appear to say “mea culpa” and others have the option to say “quite right, too!”  At the same time, they tend to say nothing about what it is, precisely, that they take responsibility for so that even as they say “mea culpa” they walk away from any real responsibility they may have.  Equally, even as they say “mea culpa” they may be walking away from holding others to account by whose acts an error occurred.  And of course the man – or woman – who leaves their job in this way does nothing to address the underlying issue, leaving this to a successor who comes in unsullied to the role.

There is, of course, the question of appearances.  Who knows what conversations UBS Chairman Kaspar Villiger may have had with CEO Oswald Gruebel about the need to appease shareholders with decisive action.  I wonder, are shareholders, journalists and other interested parties really so naive?

For my part, I’d like to see a more robust form of accountability in the public domain.  At the very least, public statements would say more about what it means to “take responsibility” in cases such as these.  Perhaps Kaspar’s statement would say “Gruebel was concerned that such a thing could happen on his watch and realised he had not been doing all he needed to to ensure robust risk management in the bank” or “whilst Gruebel is proud of the work he has done for the bank he realised it needs somebody else to get to the bottom of what happened and to make sure it can’t happen in future”.  Then, at least, we would have some insight into what “responsibility” means in this context.  Personally, I find that responsibility – accountability – comes when there is a level of detail in the public statement which makes meaning transparent.

I realise that I am standing on my soapbox right now and I am ready to step down from it – for now.  I wonder how you respond to the rolling of Oswald Gruebel’s head?