Blame Culture
2009-02-28
The article below is another that I've dredged out of my drafts, since I probably avoided posting at the time due to some or other situation at work (and I now have other work).
I haven't bothered to fix the tense.
I'm in a bad mood, and rather than focus too much on why, I'm talking to one of my colleagues about things that have put me in a bad mood in the past. A while back, under a different manager, the office had what was described as a 'no blame culture'. I didn't believe in it.
Throughout an organisation, there must be responsibilities. Arguably if people aren't responsible for particular things, it's not an organisation at all, but maybe some sort of rabble. Normally organisations have responsibility in a sort of tree: people at one level are responsible for some tasks, the next person up is responsible for making sure they understand what those tasks are and are properly equipped to do them, and so on up to the top.
Related to responsibility, but certainly not the same, is fault. When something goes wrong there should be a clear chain of people responsible for it, and by checking who was equipped for it it should be possible to find one or more people who were able to fulfill their responsibility but did not. Fault isn't an inherently bad thing - accidents and mistakes happen - but my point is that since there's always someone responsible there must always be somewhere for the fault to land, even if that means going up to the boss.
I see blame as being the dark side of fault; dictionaries define both in terms of responsibility for things that are wrong, but blame seems to have harsher connotations. It seems to have as much to do with the perception of fault as with fault itself.
An organisation requires recognition of faults. Without understanding why a problem happened, it's impossible to take proper steps to stop it happening again. It doesn't need unreasonable recriminations, and so in that respect it might be possible to minimise blame by keeping to a minimum the stigma attached to fault. In a large organisation I don't see it happening, because it only takes one person prepared to use other people's reasonable mistakes against them and fault won't be harmless, and trying to avoid it will be desirable.
Our office should be small enough to have a fair-fault culture; we have few staff so there's rarely any use hiding fault and nothing to gain by scoring points off one another. What we tried instead was a no-fault culture, in which we stopped people feeling blamed by refusing to acknowledge that they were responsible. Hence when things did go wrong, people who felt responsible felt blamed and people trying not to blame them seemed hypocritical, while other times the fault was never identified and the cause never fixed.
Maybe if you separate blame and fault as I have above you can get a no-blame culture; one of identifying fault, encouraging people to admit it and accept it, and hoping that nobody is going to hide faults or look for places to lay blame.
It's just a pipe dream though, let's face it.
I haven't bothered to fix the tense.
I'm in a bad mood, and rather than focus too much on why, I'm talking to one of my colleagues about things that have put me in a bad mood in the past. A while back, under a different manager, the office had what was described as a 'no blame culture'. I didn't believe in it.
Throughout an organisation, there must be responsibilities. Arguably if people aren't responsible for particular things, it's not an organisation at all, but maybe some sort of rabble. Normally organisations have responsibility in a sort of tree: people at one level are responsible for some tasks, the next person up is responsible for making sure they understand what those tasks are and are properly equipped to do them, and so on up to the top.
Related to responsibility, but certainly not the same, is fault. When something goes wrong there should be a clear chain of people responsible for it, and by checking who was equipped for it it should be possible to find one or more people who were able to fulfill their responsibility but did not. Fault isn't an inherently bad thing - accidents and mistakes happen - but my point is that since there's always someone responsible there must always be somewhere for the fault to land, even if that means going up to the boss.
I see blame as being the dark side of fault; dictionaries define both in terms of responsibility for things that are wrong, but blame seems to have harsher connotations. It seems to have as much to do with the perception of fault as with fault itself.
An organisation requires recognition of faults. Without understanding why a problem happened, it's impossible to take proper steps to stop it happening again. It doesn't need unreasonable recriminations, and so in that respect it might be possible to minimise blame by keeping to a minimum the stigma attached to fault. In a large organisation I don't see it happening, because it only takes one person prepared to use other people's reasonable mistakes against them and fault won't be harmless, and trying to avoid it will be desirable.
Our office should be small enough to have a fair-fault culture; we have few staff so there's rarely any use hiding fault and nothing to gain by scoring points off one another. What we tried instead was a no-fault culture, in which we stopped people feeling blamed by refusing to acknowledge that they were responsible. Hence when things did go wrong, people who felt responsible felt blamed and people trying not to blame them seemed hypocritical, while other times the fault was never identified and the cause never fixed.
Maybe if you separate blame and fault as I have above you can get a no-blame culture; one of identifying fault, encouraging people to admit it and accept it, and hoping that nobody is going to hide faults or look for places to lay blame.
It's just a pipe dream though, let's face it.
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