How To Use SRE To Cultivate A Blameless Culture In The Workplace

It’s difficult, but possible, and every company can learn, grow and benefit from this paradigm shift.

By Rajesh Narwani and Mukta Rani Chauhan

Failure is praised as essential for innovation, especially in tech firms. But organisations may not be prepared for incidents or digital disruptions. In a blame-rich environment where the culture of retribution for mistakes shoots up, the potential for development, innovation and creativity slows to a crawl. Google implemented the blameless post mortem culture to curb the pointing of fingers and criticising during incidents and problem management, and better manage the psychological safety of staff. Fortunately, more companies are following Google’s footsteps, recognising the damage that acts of blaming can cause. DBS too, has been making a conscious effort to embrace a culture that motivates people to work, collaborate, solve complex problems and fix any vulnerabilities in the systems without a fear of getting reprimanded or excluded.

What Prevents Us From Adopting A Blameless Culture?
What makes a blameless culture so hard to implement? Do we lack self-introspective abilities or situational awareness, making the culture of blaming others, inevitable? How can we bring the post mortem concept and practise it daily, and ensure that this habit sticks?

We can start by altering our gaze from fixating on inculpating the person responsible for the incident, to recognising that the incident is an opportunity to uncover the root cause and prevent it from recurring.

To Adopt The ‘Blameless’ Concept, We Must First Understand Why We Blame
At DBS, the Enterprise Architecture and Site Reliability Engineering (EASRE) team assists technology teams in achieving improvements in availability, performance and efficiency for their respective applications and systems. As an advocate of blamelessness in the EASRE Learning Team at DBS, I wondered how I could apply this in my personal life. I decided to start with my family.

As a father of four, child minding can take a toll on my patience and creativity. When a situation occurs at home, I sometimes find myself blaming my kid. While they stop their actions immediately, they don’t exactly understand the circumstances that led to the scolding. They stop because they fear punishment (e.g. a beating) should they not comply.

Reflecting on the above scenario, I asked myself: How and where do I begin helping them understand the consequences of their actions without blaming them? I worked my way backwards and researched on why people tend to blame others in the first place. I found that there are four main reasons:

1) Stereotyping
In the scenario where I scold my son, it’s usually because I assume boys are more active, and by the extension of that logic, he is naughtier than his sisters.

2) Convenience
It’s typically easy to pick on one person and make them the example for the rest to follow. In my case, it’s all too easy to make my eldest daughter the victim of blame as the eldest “ought to know” how to behave — even though she has only been on our planet for less than seven years.

3) Fear
My kids often blame one another to get out of a sticky situation. But lately, they’ve realised that banding together and finding a common ‘victim’ to avert the blame helps them to avoid the consequences of owning up to their mistakes.

4) Feeds Ego
Averting blame to others puts you in a favourable light. For example, when I scold my children for their misbehaviours, instead of wondering if their actions are a reflection of mine, I automatically shift the blame to my wife as she is the primary disciplinarian at home, which indirectly makes her feel more accountable for our childrens’ misbehaviours in the first place. Here, blaming my children’s actions on my wife’s lack of disciplining them feeds my ego, puts me in a superior seat and makes me feel like the ‘good’ person.

Blaming Outcome Newsflash: Nobody Wins
All these factors can leave the other person or group with issues such as concealing evidence and mistakes, lack of cooperation, or unwillingness to take initiatives in any future activity.

This further brings me to a realisation that the direction and culture at home or an organisation emanates from the top. As Dr. John C. Maxwell once said, “Everything rises and falls on leadership”. It is important that the leaders cultivate an environment that eliminates blaming and embraces learning without reproach. While the aim is to be blameless at an individual level, it is always helpful to start the top. I believe that great leaders can foster a positive change.

From here comes the next step: How do we start combating the blame game, both at organisational and individual levels?

The First Step To Adopting A Blameless Culture
Now that we are aware of the common reasons we may use to blame others, we can redefine the culture in a healthy and positive manner through some baby steps:

1) Being conscious of our tone and choice of words when approaching others during an incident, and reframing them in a way that’ll help us deal with the situation more objectively.

2) Using a constructive approach to mistakes made by others. Do it privately or only between parties involved, and play the role as a mediator where possible. When mistakes need to be surfaced in public, ensure that the goal is to make them learn rather than feel humiliated.

3) Setting an example by taking the ownership of failures encourages others to own their mistakes too. Additionally, when owning a mistake comes with the knowledge that there will be no lashing out, this results in inner security and self-confidence being built. Would this perspective help us build more trust within our teams? Here are examples of conversations we can put into practise whenever an outage occurs within the team.

To find out the cause of an incident
In a blame-rich situation: Hey, did you make this error since you were the one responsible for this task?

In a blameless situation: An incident has occurred in our system. Does anyone know what the possible causes could be?

To guide others during an incident
In a blame-rich situation: Why did you not teach other teammates how to handle the errors? As the most senior team member, you should have known all the preventive steps.

In a blameless situation: An error has occurred in our system. Let me brief you on how to fix it, and steps to take to ensure that it does not happen in future if possible.

To empower others after an incident
In a blame-rich situation: You know, when I started work, I was in your position, and was more responsible. Look at you, you work in such a hurry, which leads to incidents.

In a blameless situation: From my personal experience, when I create a task sheet, it helps me manage my deliverables more effectively, and lessens mistakes. Perhaps you can try this too, and see if it works for you.

Conclusion
Blameless culture is not a spell that you cast once for an everlasting effect, but a seed that needs to be sown and tended to in our everyday routine. In the past few years, we have seen blamelessness grow organically within the teams. It has reduced micro-management and downtime at work, giving each of us a healthy space to work on our tasks, and present ideas and solutions more confidently whenever an incident occurs.

DBS’ holistic approach to blameless culture shapes the perspective, behaviour and practices of everyone involved in incidents when they happen. This has proven effective for us as an organisation, and we are continuing to grow in a blameless, actions focused, and forward-looking environment.

Rajesh Narwani has close to 20 years of content creation experience, including developing videos and authoring e-learning courses. As a part of the learning and development team at DBS Bank, he has helped in producing short and long-form content, video marketing materials, courses and more.

Mukta is a communications specialist at DBS with experience in internal communication, copywriting, editing, blogging and social media management.