Who Judges the Judges? Accountability Lessons from Jessica Kerr

Who Judges the Judges? Accountability Lessons from Jessica Kerr

In any organization, the people who set the rules are only as trustworthy as the processes that verify they’re followed. When the rule-makers also police themselves, the temptation to protect status or dodge scrutiny can creep in. The question “Who judges the judges?” isn’t just a political puzzle; it’s a practical problem for teams building software, products, and cultures. Jessica Kerr’s writings push us to reframe accountability as an infrastructural problem—one that can be designed, observed, and improved, rather than left to the goodwill or fear of individuals.

The accountability dilemma in practice

Consider a software project where senior engineers author code standards, project leaders approve architectural decisions, and managers sign off on releases. If mistakes slip through, who gets to call them out, and how? Without transparent processes, accountability becomes a game of whispers, reputations, and informal pressure. Kerr suggests that the cure isn’t louder blame but a systemic approach: making the grounds for decisions, the checks in place, and the outcomes visible to the whole team. In other words, accountability should be engineered into how work is done, not imposed as a postmortem after a failure.

What Jessica Kerr teaches about accountability

• Blameless by design. A healthy team treats mistakes as data, not declarations of character. When the system frames errors as opportunities to learn, people are more willing to surface issues early.
• Visibility of decisions. Documenting the why behind a choice creates a trace that others can review. It’s easier to audit outcomes when the original rationale lives in the project’s memory, not scattered conversations.
• Multiple accountability pathways. Relying on a single gatekeeper creates bottlenecks and defensiveness. By distributing right-to-question authority—and rotating reviews—teams avoid single points of failure in governance.
• Questioning as a skill, not a threat. Cultivating psychological safety means encouraging hard questions without fear of reprisal. When teammates feel safe to challenge, the system learns faster and repairs sooner.
• Learning loops over punishment. Post-incident analyses should prioritize fixes and process improvements, not retroactive scapegoating. The goal is a better system for the next time, not a louder stern lecture today.

Accountability isn’t a weapon for blame; it’s a feedback loop that reveals how our systems fail and what we can do to fix them. Inspired by Jessica Kerr’s approach to engineering culture

Practical takeaways for teams

• Create a decision log. Every major choice—its alternatives, the reasoning, and the expected outcomes—should be recorded in a living document. This makes the basis for accountability explicit and reviewable.
• Rotate review duties. Implement a rotating set of reviewers for critical changes. Rotation prevents gatekeeping by a fixed group and broadens collective accountability.
• Institutionalize blameless postmortems. After incidents, focus on what happened, why it happened, and how to prevent recurrence, not who caused it. Share learnings openly with the entire team.
• Use pre-mortems as a planning tool. Before launching a project or feature, imagine potential failures and capture the safeguards needed to avert them. This reframes risk from afterthought to design input.
• Align incentives with system health. Tie metrics to reliability, security, and maintainability rather than solely to speed or individual heroics. When success depends on the system, accountability follows naturally.
• Make failures observable to the whole organization. dashboards, runbooks, and clear incident reports reduce the mystique around problems. When everyone sees the friction points, they can contribute to improvements rather than assign blame.

Designing accountability into work culture

Accountability infused into daily practice changes the dynamics of a team. It shifts conversations from “Who’s at fault?” to “What needs to be fixed, and how do we prevent it from recurring?” Kerr’s lens invites engineers, managers, and product owners to treat governance as a craft—something that can be improved with intentional design, shared language, and collective responsibility. The payoff isn’t just fewer bugs or faster releases; it’s a healthier, more resilient culture where people trust the process enough to speak up—and trust the outcomes enough to act on them.

Closing reflection

When you ask “Who judges the judges?” in a modern tech context, the answer is not a single arbiter but a constellation of practices that hold decision-makers to account in real time. By embracing blameless critique, transparent decision-making, and distributed accountability, teams can turn Kerr’s insights into everyday practice. The goal isn’t to remove accountability but to democratize it—so that the right voices can question, adjust, and improve the systems we rely on, together.