The blame game

When we talk about new ways of working, we talk about trust and autonomy, and moving responsibility to the teams. This sounds scary. Most organizations are designed from the ground up to assign responsibility to individuals. A popular phrase is “When everyone is responsible, no one is responsible”. Popular or not, this phrase is wrong. Contrary to popular belief, assigning responsibility to individuals have zero benefits. And one very negative consequence.

It enables us to assign blame.

Many see the ability to assign blame not only as a good thing, but a necessity. In reality, it is a VERY bad thing. Why? As you already know, people hate being blamed when bad things happened. In theory, this should prevent people from doing bad things. Interestingly, people make just as many mistakes. Surely their energy should go into avoiding blame if they hate it so much? And it does, but not in the way you’d expect.

People can’t decide to not make mistakes. Because believe it or not, people don’t make mistakes on purpose. Instead their energy goes into hiding their mistakes, or shifting blame to someone else. This happens at several levels. The individual who made the mistake, the manager responsible for that individual, the manager responsible for that manager, and so on. Everyone tries to hide what happened to the layer above, until the problem either somehow winks out of existence, or the blame shifts somewhere else. In reality, the problem is of course still present, and lurks around waiting to happen again.

People can’t decide to not make mistakes, because believe it or not, people don’t make mistakes on purpose.

Human error isn’t the result of bad people, it’s the result of systemic issues in our organization. We don’t avoid future mistakes by blaming people. And it doesn’t help to fire them. We avoid future mistakes by learning from them. And the person who knows best how to do that, is probably the person you want to fire. This is why we need to stop “making people responsible” and we need to stop assigning blame. Nothing happens when you make someone responsible, except that it enables you to assign blame, create shame and erode trust. Your problem is still a problem, and you’ve now made it more difficult to fix.

Whenever something bad occurs, we need an organization where it feels safe to discuss what happened, and how it happened. What assumptions were made? What was the situation? What about the system around it allowed this to happen? What decisions did we make and why? How can we learn, and make different decisions in the future?

If we want to effectively discuss these topics, we can’t have everyone involved walking around in fear of punishment and negative consequences. Blame is an ingredient that does nothing to prevent mistakes, and makes them a lot harder to fix. Organizations tend to promote incentives that lead to competitive behaviour and blame games. What they should be doing is build incentives that encourage people to create value collaboratively. You want people to focus on delivering as a team, not hiding mistakes and shifting blame.

If there’s a correlation between responsible people and blame culture, it’s a negative one. If you want peope to behave responsibly, stop looking for scape goats. Make sure teams feel safe, understand boundaries and expectations, share a common goal and have authority to make decisions about how to get there. Magic will happen.

Follow me on Twitter: @TSigberg

Inspired by this awesome article on blameless post mortems by John Allspaw: https://codeascraft.com/2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/