Comment by lostcolony

So I've actually written about this in the past, but, responsibility is -actually effecting the entity-.

That is, "you're responsible for this" - if they do it, and it succeeds, what happens? If they don't do it, and it fails, what happens? If the answer is "nothing" in either of those cases, they're not actually responsible. If the result is too detached, they're also not actually responsible (i.e., if I decide not to do one of the ten tasks assigned to me, and I don't hear about it until review time, if at all, then I was never responsible).

Responsibility is innately tied with knowledge and empowerment, but without going on at length, and to just give an example - if I'm the one woken up by the pagerduty alarm when something breaks, I am responsible for that something, because its success or failure directly affects me. If, however, there is a separate ops team that has to deal with it, and I can slumber peacefully, responsibility has been diluted; you won't get as good a result.