The Subtle Art of Avoiding Blame and Taking Responsibility
Using Empiricism and the Scrum Values as a Guide
Fault and responsibility are not the same thing. If you are driving and another car hits you, it’s not necessarily your fault, but you must take at least some responsibility for dealing with the consequences.
Fault is about the past: something that has already happened. Responsibility is future-facing: what happens next?
Scrum Teams work on complex, adaptive problems. In complex environments, things can happen fast. Scrum Teams don’t dwell on the past for long, because the future is almost guaranteed to be volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA).
Scrum (n): A framework within which people can address complex adaptive problems — Scrum Guide
In this VUCA context, when we encounter difficulties, there is an easy option available. We can roll our eyes and blame those who we believe caused the difficulties.
It can be “difficult to know how to approach a challenging situation and easy to use VUCA as a crutch, a way to throw off the hard work” (Source: Nathan Bennett, HBR)
With imperfect outcomes, there is an easy tendency to assign blame and avoid genuine problem-solving.
