Don’t play the blame game

The “Bad Apple Theory” assumes that the problem is always within the person and not the organisation.

When someone does a mistake and they’re harshly reprimanded for it, the next time it happens they’ll prefer to work hard to maintain that a secret.

I learned that from a very young age: my Mother did the mom yell most of the times I screwed up, while my Dad generally accepted my apologies IF I told him the truth before hand. So I obviously preferred to speak with my Dad when it happened.

Of course, my Mom had good intentions — she thought that if I was reprehended for every mistake, I would not repeat them. But I did. I just didn’t tell her.

In traditional management, this can fit inside the “Bad Apple Theory”. This theory advocates that if you eliminate the bad apples you’ll eliminate human error. It also advocates that the fear of punishment will motivate people to act correctly in the future. Implicitly, it assumes that the problem is always within the person and not the organisation.

You can see different degrees of this theory in action on companies where some of your friends and family work at. There, when shit happens, people will be looking for the responsible person, reprehend them, tell them to “not do that again”, and in some cases, possibly yell and even fire.

People could be learning from everyone’s mistakes, but they aren’t.

The problem is that in companies, the consequences of that are bigger than just avoiding telling mom of what we just did:

• People in the company are going to be afraid to commit errors. Consequently, they’ll be afraid to try new things and innovate.
• Every time a problem appears, the whole organisation will be focused on finding the culprit instead of trying to fix things. This is a vicious cycle that’s hard to stop.
• Because of hiding, and because of giving priority to blaming, the organisation is now shortsighted of possible future problems and how they can be avoided. People could be learning from everyone’s mistakes, but they aren’t.

Most of the times the problem resides inside the process and circumstances, not the person.

How should we handle failure after it happens?

Knowing this, (specially) the startup community embraced this culture of acceptance of failure — “Fail fast, fail often”, they say.

What happens though, is that even if everybody understands it, many don’t know how this applies in practice — “How should we handle failure after it happens?”

At Whitesmith we try to apply the following points. These are, as everything, a remix of learnings from other companies (as Thoughtbot and Etsy) and previous experiences:

• Make failure Post Mortems a habit. Every time something goes wrong, gather with everyone evolved and write down the why of what happened, and how to avoid it in the future. This can take 5 minutes or 2 hours. Since this is a standard procedure everyone sees it as normal. Reflections about failure become normal.
• Focus on identifying causes, not culprits. Because most of the times the problem resides inside the process and circumstances, not the person. As soon as you start playing the blame game, you’ll have a hard time stopping it. This means that the whole company will become more worried blaming others than finding the real issue, and people will not speak for being afraid of punishment. Instead, spend energy digging deep to find the root cause. Do it by asking “why” as many times until you really find it.
• Assume good will. When mistakes happen, humans have a bias towards assuming wrong intentions, ignoring the circumstances at the moment of decision. But the truth is that whoever made the error, probably had a good reason for it (or at least they thought). Always start with that assumption in mind.

Different variations of this approach can be seen in different types of organisations now — companies, sports, and even in the military. These organisations are leaving the “Bad Apple Theory” behind to apply new approaches that, not only foster a healthier environment, but also brings better results to the team. They aren’t playing the blame game.

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I’m Daniel, Product Manager at Whitesmith. Paper Planes is a place where I reflect on my experiences and lessons on the craft of Product Management.