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I love how Sidney Decker’s Just Culture (by way of Mandy Brown) highlights how retributive and restorative approaches to Justice hinge on alternate definitions of “accountability”. Retributive accountability rests on “account” in the bookkeeping sense of a debt to be paid: if you’re responsible for something bad, something bad must be done to you to bring the account into balance. Restorative accountability on the other hand sees “account” in the Storytelling sense: if you’re responsible for a bad outcome, you should be able to give an account of why you did it—how it made sense to do it—so that the conditions that led to it, the broader system, can be improved to avoid people causing that negative outcome in the future.