A responsibility address is the model’s answer to the characteristic failure of distributed governance: everyone participates and nobody is accountable. Every consequential decision should have an identifiable person or body that must explain it afterward — not to assign blame for everything, but to ensure that accountability actually lands somewhere real. The test is whether someone held sufficient authority that holding them to account is coherent.
The matched pair
It produces two rules that must hold together: no jurisdiction without responsibility, and no responsibility without sufficient jurisdiction. The second half is violated everywhere — organizations routinely hold people responsible for outcomes they had no authority to control, which is the classic structure of scapegoating. Responsibility and jurisdiction have to correspond, or accountability becomes theater. See Who Gets to Decide?.