Liability and Authority are not especially complex concepts. Liability simply defined is the amount of responsibility you take for a situation or event. Authority simply defined is the amount of control you have over a situation or event. This applies to all things in life. It is a constant battle that parents face with teenagers, successful marriages find balance here, employers and employees face it often. Today I'd like to focus on what it means for software suppliers. (I don't say software vendors for a reason).

Why they must match.
When authority and liability are equal, you have harmony. People feel that they can control their situation but yet they are responsible for their actions. This rewards people for taking ownership and protects them from feeling out of control.

With teenagers you will see much more personal growth if you put them in situations where they have to make decisions of their own, but they are responsible for their decisions. It is important to work with in practical bounds. The pressures that a teenager has on them from society in general is significant. Asking them to have authority over or liability for things outside of their context can lead to kids who grow up really fast and end up with jaded views on society. Not giving them the authority and liability over even the most mundane things can leave kids who grow up unprepared for life on their own.

The bond that holds a marriage together changes over time. You will find different key aspects of life take a huge toll on couples. Finances must be managed, children must be cared for, career decisions must be made, family issues must be managed. Traditionally one partner would bring home the bread while the other partner held down the fort. Modern couples with individual careers face stronger challenges trying to balance these things. Each person has to take into consideration more facets of the other person's career in their own career planning.

With employees this balance is just a crucial. You can't expect an individual contributor to feel responsible for the actions of the whole team, nor can you expect an individual contributor to dictate the direction of an entire team. There is a fine line here between leadership and bullying. It is the job of the manager or team lead to dictate the direction of the team and to take responsibility for the actions of the entire team. But when it comes to an individual's contribution, the balance between their authority and their liability must be maintained.

With software suppliers they may not feel that they have either authority or liability. In this case the balance of these two will generally manifest itself in integrity. Software suppliers need to understand what their customers need and accept responsibility for their efforts to meet the needs of the customer. They must at the same time strive to leave the customer with as much freedom as possible. This doesn't apply only to software vendors which make money off of customers. While integrity in this instance might be measured more acutely in the form of contracts and fees paid, even an open source project enters into an ad-hoc social contract with their community. Once you decide to put your work out on source forge or git hub and start responding to community requests you start to enjoy some amount of celebrity that binds you to that community. It becomes an issue of integrity if you don't follow through with your commitments.

What happens when liability exceeds authority?

When liability exceed authority you'll find a lot of additional pressure. You have situations where people feel trapped and it will seem like a no-win situation. I have seen a couple of archetypes come out of this scenario. The renegade vigilante, helpless victim, and lone hero.

The renegade vigilante will quickly begin to bend rules. They will find mechanisms to live within the letter of the law but they will find a way to fight the system. Sometimes they will follow the rules to the point of being belligerent and confrontational. While this archetype may seem like the most dangerous, I've actually found it to be one of the least harmful in the long run. People feeling this spirit often still have their hearts in the right place and they are willing to lead. If you can give them more of a balance in their role you will often find that they are very strong resources. The key here is that they are ACTIVE in doing something and not being passive. You will see this behavior in militias, union jobs, and occasionally in a well disciplined military unit that doesn't believe in what they were fighting for.

The helpless victim is the worst archetype in my mind. This person no longer accepts responsibility for the situation. They often will not even accept responsibility for their own direct actions. If confronted about an action they took that was inappropriate they will simply imply that it doesn't matter what they do, or that they did the only thing they could based on the situation. You will see this behavior in sports teams without good coaches, undisciplined military units that don't believe in what they are fighting for, and wage slave style jobs where the execs make bank while the employees drown in misery. You can not save these people. You can only put them out of their misery. Anyone who's given up the hope or will to thrive in a situation is beyond hope. You may return them to basic productivity but none of them will ever reach for the stars again.

The final archetype, the lone hero will manifest itself in someone who refuses to surrender until snap. This is the type of person who will continue to be assertive and to take action, but they will continue to work within the boundaries and obey the rules. Refusal to surrender, while respectable, can almost be more damaging in the long run because it sets up the artificial perception that either things are in balance or that things out of balance is acceptable. One trademark assumption of this lone hero is the feeling that there is transparency and everyone is on the same page. You will find these people saying things like, "I can't believe management is knowingly doing this to us," or "This customer is insane to imagine they can ask for this and we can deliver it." But the key is that they don't speak up. No matter how many times I discover this person in jobs I have, and no matter how many times I find myself in this situation, it never ceases to amaze me. I would have to say the most vivid example for this is Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, in simple terms you could almost say that was what the book was about (SIMPLE TERMS!). The biggest issue with this last archetype is that they usually go until they are so burned out the situation can't be repaired. They either snap one day and freak out management who was pretending all along that things were fine, or they quit caring and turn into a helpless victim. Occasionally you will find them turn into renegades, but their need to obey the rules and inability to take the easy way out makes this rare.

What happens when authority exceeds liability?
When authority exceeds liability you will get some form of (obviously) no accountability. You will have situations where someone will create a situation for someone else that isn't fair and they either won't realize it or won't care. The archetypes for this situation are the princess, the dictator, and "the chosen one".

The princess is someone who honestly has no idea what the impact is of the decisions they are making. This type of person will have the best of intentions, but they will find that they have no clue what it means to do what they are doing. Because the consequences of their decisions are often hidden from them by external forces, they will just seem like spoiled kids. You will often hear people refer to the princess as someone who "takes them for granted". Someone who leaves the air conditioning on all weekend even though they never come in on the weekend. Someone who sends everything overnight because the company pays for it. Customers who dream of the world after a budget has been locked in for a project. One key note here is that because of the spoiled brat's good intentions, they are the most likely to pay attention when you make them aware of the lack of balance. It's often an honest mistake. They can be saved.

The dictator is someone who knows that there is an imbalance but they actively sustain it. They will take actions to continue the imbalance simply because it allows them to control the situation and reduces their obligation. These are the most dastardly of co-workers. These are the people you truly do loathe and these are the characteristics in a software provider that you hate most. The most critical aspect of this is the notion that someone is doing it on purpose. They may not see it as cut and dry as others will from the outside, but they still know that what they are doing is wrong, and they aren't taking steps to fix the situation. I see a lot of this in off-shoring and outsourcing. Someone who is still in-sourced feels like they can treat third party providers or offshore resources like garbage because they are locked into a contract where the provider needs the job/work more than the dictator needs the workers. This is rarely the case. As with most bullies, if you stand up to a dictator and they don't have a firm control over the situation they may give up. But like a bear who's tasted human flesh, you have to put them down. You can not keep these resources around.

The final archetype for this side of the scenario, "the chosen one" is the most rare. This is a person who honestly feels like the balance is that way and it's beyond control. The difference between this person and the princess is the awareness of the imbalance, and the desire to have balance restored, but the perception that for whatever reason it's just impossible. The difference between this person and the dictator is primarily the malicious intent of the dictator to sustain the situation. This person may feel like they have so much authority because they are so extraordinary. They may feel that anyone could achieve these goals if they worked at it. They may feel like they are just naturally more gifted than other people (sometimes they are!) This translates for them into a situation where they are protecting those weaker or less capable (sometimes they are!). I have seen this a lot in really strong individual contributors. People who feel like the fact that they can produce 10x as much means they should, but they expect to have people change the rules for them. I am absolutely and without a doubt often the "chosen one." I could come up with another whole post on justifications and validations.

While I say lone in each context, it does not mean that it could not be a group, but if it is a group it is a group that thinks and operates as a single unit. You will even find sometimes that multiple people operating in a similar situation will exacerbate the situation. Think of some of these things you've heard before:

"Misery loves company."
"If he can do it so can I."
"I don't see why i should worry about it nobody else does..."

What does this mean for commercial software?
For commercial software suppliers you will find that a proper balance makes for a long term successful relationship with customers, clients, and the community.

If commercial software companies have more liability than they have authority, you'll find more than just an unhappy customer base. You will find that the company is racing from client to client or customer to customer trying to make everyone happy. This will lead to trends in software development such as short-circuiting the quality control process. Or they will not take the time to refactor features added for a single customer into the base build. Different customer advocate teams (account managers, help desk, etc.) will attempt to drive their sub-agenda in such a way that you will find conflicts. One customer may demand more flexibility when another customer demands more consistency.

When commercial software companies have more authority than liability, you'll find them often succumbing to an entirely different set of temptations. They might feel that since a customer is locked in they have no obligation to meet the customer half way on requests. They may feel that it is more important to drive revenue than it is to sustain customer satisfaction. They feel a certain sense of entitlement that leaves the customer unhappy, but apparently unable to do anything about it.

Customers who don't have enough authority will find themselves resentful of the supplier. You will find them starting guerilla marketing campaigns against the company, people will protest in forums and any visible place where they feel they might be heard. The individuals interacting with the customers will have very stressful jobs and will often be in the same boat as the client when it comes to interacting with management within the company. Individuals from within the customer's organization forced to work with this supplier will seek other projects, or they will try to seek other vendors.

One of the worst possible scenarios is when the customer has too much authority. If you think about the tangible situations in which case this can happen you're almost always dealing with a small supplier. The customer can be big or small, the symptoms are comparable. You will find that a customer who is uneducated or unaware can tend to ask for things that are impossible. Or they will ask for things that are possible, but far outside of the scope of the agreed upon contract. This can drive the supplier into the "renegade vigilante" mode, where they explicitly ask for everything in writing, argue about every point, wave the contracts back and forth, etc.

What does this mean for open source?
For an open source project, the rules are no different, but the impact can be substantially different. Open source projects in this context are limited to the ones that don't have signed support contracts. Those are more typically modeled as commercial software development suppliers. The projects that are not directly financially funded through contractual obligation earn their donations and support in a very different manner. The fact that the binding is based on trust and re-affirmed on a regular basis means that it is a lot more honest and genuine.

Looking at the nature of these situations that result in an imbalance you will find that rarely are they that way from the inception of the relationship/situation. For an individual team member joining a team that is already in one of these situations you will find that they may resist or transform the relationship, but they generally blend in unless they are substantial in their authority. But other than those situations, you will usually find that these things build over time. It starts out with a one party agreeing to something they shouldn't agree to and deteriorates into a full blown imbalance.

In a relationship based on trust, that is refreshed in a regular basis, it's quite difficult for an imbalance to persist. They may start, but usually things will right themselves before they get out of hand. This is not to say that open source projects don't suffer other risks (losing critical mass, significant design issue splitting the team up, etc.), I am just saying that they are resistant to this type of problem in comparison to commercial software suppliers.

In closing, I would just like to remind you how much you hate your relationship with (insert name of your top commercial software vendor) and love your relationship with (insert name of your top open source project).