Responsibility: Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody

An internal email was just sent to our tech team about a problem, ending with “Can someone look into this?”

It reminded me of a short story about  responsibility:

This is a little story about four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody.

There was an important job to be done and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it.

Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it.

Somebody got angry about that because it was Everybody’s job.

Everybody thought that Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn’t do it.

It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done

In other words, if you’re delegating a task or asking for something to be done – make sure you delegate to Somebody, otherwise Nobody will do it.