Who's the boss?

One thing that has seemed weird to me over the past few days is responsibility and how it can be diffuse, or circular.

This probably happens to a lot of office jobs, in and out of government. At all previous jobs of mine the chain of responsibility was pretty clear: I had my boss, and he had his boss I probably knew of but interacted with little, and so on up depending on the size of the organization. There were no responsibilities outside that chain, except for basic human civility - I couldn't tell someone to fuck off if they asked me to put on overalls for a restaging of "American Gothic," but I could politely refuse if I felt like it, unless my boss decided it would be a good idea. Day-to-day work could get complicated, but in theory my responsibilities were very clear and direct.

That's not the case here, and probably isn't at most jobs in any Byzantine bureaucracy. The supervisor of tech writers assigns me to project teams. Each team has an RDM who sets the schedule and coordinates between all the other team members and is theoretically the only person on the team who tells me what to do. But RDMs aren't the experts, those are the SMEs, so when SMEs tell me what to do I usually just do it. And the RDMs aren't the SMEs' main bosses, their main bosses are in their own departments devoted to various subsets of this agency's regulatory mission. SMEs' responsibilities vary; one SME on the doomed project cared a great deal about how a certain phrase was worded and that phrase appears in almost every section of the document, but other than that, he only cares about two small sections that are all his own, about six pages out of 300. And finally there's the senior tech writer, who doesn't actually supervise me, but is supposedly the resident expert on the details of our job and works closely with my supervisor on who gets assigned to which project.

So SMEs shouldn't tell me what to do but often do so anyway but there are some things they still wouldn't get away with. The RDMs inform team members of deadlines and schedule meetings but can't actually do anything about it if people miss them. Every team member and their boss has an OCD-level attention to detail on certain topics and doesn't know or care about the rest. My supervisor keeps a close eye on what I'm doing but rarely actually tells me what to do.

The doomed project is a huge example of this fractal org chart, but something like it happens on every project because everyone on a team is responsible to their own boss more than they're responsible to anyone on the team.