Use when viewing, updating, or auditing the Accountability Chart — seats, owners, and roles
Manage the Accountability Chart — the organizational structure that defines who owns what seat, what each seat's 5 key responsibilities are, and the reporting hierarchy. Every function of the business has one clear owner. A person can own multiple seats, but every seat needs exactly one owner.
Search upward from the current directory for the .ceos marker file. This file marks the root of the CEOS repository.
If .ceos is not found, stop and tell the user: "Not in a CEOS repository. Clone your CEOS repo and run setup.sh first."
Sync before use: Once you find the CEOS root, run git -C <ceos_root> pull --ff-only --quiet 2>/dev/null to get the latest data from teammates. If it fails (conflict or offline), continue silently with local data.
| File | Purpose |
|---|---|
data/accountability.md | The Accountability Chart (source of truth) |
templates/accountability.md | Template for new charts (used by setup.sh init) |
data/people/ | Person evaluation files (cross-reference for Audit) |
The chart is a single markdown file (data/accountability.md) with this structure:
## CompanyName at the top with a *Last updated: YYYY-MM-DD* line## SeatName heading followed by:
**Owner:** PersonName (or [Name] if unfilled)Example seat:
## VP of Sales
**Owner:** Mike Torres
| # | Role |
|---|------|
| 1 | Revenue — hit quarterly sales targets |
| 2 | Pipeline — maintain 3x pipeline coverage |
| 3 | Team — recruit, coach, and retain sales reps |
| 4 | Process — define and enforce the sales playbook |
| 5 | Reporting — weekly forecast and funnel metrics |
Hierarchy is implicit from the order of seats in the file. The Visionary and Integrator appear first (top of org), followed by functional seats (Sales, Ops, Finance, etc.).
Template placeholders: [Name] for empty owner, [Key responsibility] for undefined roles.
When the user asks to see the accountability chart or check seat ownership.
Read data/accountability.md. If the file doesn't exist: "No accountability chart found. Run ./setup.sh init to create one from the template, or create data/accountability.md manually."
Walk through the file and extract each seat:
## SeatName heading text**Owner:** (or "empty" if [Name])Show the chart in a clear hierarchical format:
Accountability Chart — Acme Corp
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Last updated: 2026-02-01
Visionary Brad Feld 5/5 roles
Integrator Sarah Chen 5/5 roles
├── VP of Sales Mike Torres 5/5 roles
├── VP of Operations Daniel Kim 5/5 roles
└── VP of Finance (empty) 0/5 roles
If the user asks for detail, show each seat with its full role table.
Summary: 5 seats | 4 filled | 1 empty | avg 4.0 roles per seat
When the user wants to modify the accountability chart — add, change, or remove seats.
Ask for:
Display the new seat in the correct format:
## VP of Product
**Owner:** [Collected name or [Name]]
| # | Role |
|---|------|
| 1 | [Role 1] |
| 2 | [Role 2] |
| 3 | [Role 3] |
| 4 | [Role 4] |
| 5 | [Role 5] |
Ask: "Add this seat to the accountability chart?"
Insert the new seat at the correct position in data/accountability.md. Add a --- separator before the new seat. Update the *Last updated:* date to today.
Show the current chart (list seats with owners). Ask: "Which seat do you want to modify?"
Accept by title or owner name.
Display the seat's current title, owner, and all 5 roles.
Ask what to change:
Display the before and after:
Modifying: VP of Sales
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Owner: Mike Torres → Sarah Chen
Roles changed:
3. (was) Team — recruit, coach, and retain sales reps
3. (now) Team — recruit and develop account executives
Ask: "Apply these changes?"
Update the seat in data/accountability.md. Update the *Last updated:* date to today.
Show the current chart. Ask: "Which seat do you want to remove?"
Show the seat being removed with all its details. Warn:
"Removing a seat means this function will no longer have a dedicated owner. Are you sure?"
If the seat has an owner: "The owner ([person]) will no longer be assigned to this seat. They may need to be assigned to another seat or evaluated."
Remove the seat section from data/accountability.md. Update the *Last updated:* date to today.
Always show the complete diff before writing any changes in Update mode.
When the user wants to check the chart for structural issues, stale data, or mismatches with People Analyzer data.
Read data/accountability.md and check each seat for:
| Check | Pass | Fail |
|---|---|---|
| Has an owner | Owner name present | [Name] or blank |
| Has 5 roles | Exactly 5 non-placeholder entries | Fewer or more than 5 |
| No placeholders | All roles have real text | Contains [Key responsibility] |
| Last updated date | Within 180 days | Older than 180 days |
Read all files in data/people/ and compare:
data/people/. Create one?"data/people/mike-torres.md. Confirm match?"Name matching should be case-insensitive and match on first name if the full name matches a person file.
Accountability Chart Audit
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Seat Checks:
| Seat | Owner | Roles | Placeholders | Status |
|----------------|---------------|-------|-------------|--------|
| Visionary | Brad Feld | 5/5 | None | ✅ |
| Integrator | Sarah Chen | 5/5 | None | ✅ |
| VP Sales | Mike Torres | 5/5 | None | ✅ |
| Operations | (empty) | 3/5 | 2 remaining | 🔴 |
| Finance | (empty) | 0/5 | 5 remaining | 🔴 |
Cross-Reference:
⚠️ Mike Torres has no person file — create data/people/mike-torres.md?
⚠️ Operations seat is empty — hiring gap or reassignment needed
Multi-Seat Check:
Brad Feld owns 1 seat (Visionary)
Sarah Chen owns 1 seat (Integrator)
Mike Torres owns 1 seat (VP Sales)
Chart Freshness:
✅ Last updated 14 days ago (within 180-day threshold)
Overall: 3/5 seats fully defined | 2 empty seats | 1 person missing evaluation
For each issue found, suggest an action:
ceos-people Evaluate mode for [Person]."View: Hierarchical chart display with seat titles, owners, and role counts. Summary stats at the bottom.
Update: Before/after diff for modifications. Complete seat preview for additions. Confirmation prompt before every write.
Audit: Table with per-seat status flags. Cross-reference results. Multi-seat ownership summary. Suggested fixes for each issue found.
data/accountability.md without showing the complete change and getting approval. This is the most important rule — the accountability chart affects everyone in the company.data/accountability.md only. It reads from data/people/ for Audit, but never writes to people files. Suggest running ceos-people instead.data/accountability.md is modified, update the *Last updated: YYYY-MM-DD* line at the top of the file to today's date.ceos-people, ceos-quarterly, and ceos-annual when relevant, but let the user decide when to switch workflows.## How to Use This Chart section and all --- separators intact. Only modify seat sections.ceos-people reads data/accountability.md to determine which seat a person occupies during GWC evaluation. The seat: field in person files should match a seat title from the chart.ceos-accountability Audit mode reads data/people/ to detect mismatches between seat owners and person files. It does not write to people files.ceos-people Evaluate mode for [Person]."ceos-quarterly uses the accountability chart to understand reporting relationships — who reports to whom determines which conversations need to happen.ceos-accountability Audit to ensure the chart is current and seats are correctly assigned.ceos-annual references the accountability chart during the organizational checkup — a key step where the leadership team reviews the chart top-to-bottom.ceos-accountability Update mode before setting next year's Rocks.Other skills (ceos-people, ceos-quarterly, ceos-annual, ceos-l10) read data/accountability.md for reference. Only ceos-accountability writes to this file. This preserves a single source of truth for organizational structure changes.