As Walter studied the next slide, Ellen's position became clear. The slide showed her root cause diagram with colored bubbles indicating which department had contributed which causes, and Geoff owned the largest share. If she was playing the blame game, Geoff was her target.
To prevent a battle between Ellen and Geoff, Walter offered, "I can see there's plenty of blame to go around, though I'm sure we could debate the allocations."
Walter's tactic might be successful. Distributing blame across the entire team is one way to prevent scapegoating. It also has an unintended consequence — it validates the idea of assigning blame.
Blame is toxic to organizations. When blame is in the air, punishment follows. To avoid punishment, we deflect blame from ourselves, or allocate it to others. We'll even take action to insulate ourselves from blame — we dodge involvement, withhold contributions, and make protective "CYA" statements.
The ensuing confusion prevents the organization and its people from learning from failures. Organizations and people who cannot learn from failures inevitably repeat them.
When blame is in the air,
punishment followsBlame-oriented cultures (B cultures) seek causes so they can punish, while Responsibility-oriented cultures (R cultures) seek causes so they can learn. To identify the culture of your organization, look at how people use language, how they acknowledge failure, how they understand failure, and how they look at the past.
- Using language
- In B cultures, people "take the blame," "get tagged," "get dinged," or "take the fall." Generally, B cultures have "post mortems" while R cultures have "retrospectives."
- Acknowledging failure
- B cultures have difficulty acknowledging failure, because acknowledgment precedes blame, and blame precedes punishment. Failing projects live on, long past the time when they should have been cancelled. R cultures acknowledge failures more easily, because they see them as opportunities to learn. Projects that should be cancelled (or restarted) are.
- Understanding failure
- To limit the resulting punishment, B cultures think failure is caused by the actions of a single person or organization. R cultures see failure as the result of a complex network of causes. They do this, in part, to maximize the resulting learning.
- Looking at the past
- In B cultures, retrospectives — if they are held at all — are starved of resources. When retrospectives do occur, they're tense, painful, dangerous affairs in which people withhold comments that could otherwise lead to real progress. R cultures invest in retrospectives, enlisting professional assistance to ensure the safety of participants. The organization and its people both benefit.
Consistent with B culture thinking, those who live in B cultures often blame the CEO or upper management for their problems. Although changing the culture from B to R does indeed require change at the top, everyone must change. Change can start anywhere. It can start with you. Top Next Issue
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For indicators that an organizational culture is a blaming culture, see "Top Ten Signs of a Blaming Culture," Point Lookout for February 16, 2005. The words blame and accountability are often used interchangeably, but they have very different meanings. See "Is It Blame or Is It Accountability?," Point Lookout for December 21, 2005, for a discussion of blame and accountability. For the effects of blame on the investigations of unwanted outcomes, see "Obstacles to Finding the Reasons Why," Point Lookout for April 4, 2012. For more on blaming and blaming organizations, see "Organizational Coping Patterns."
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Related articles
More articles on Organizational Change:
- Workplace Taboos and Change
- In the workplace, some things can't be discussed — they are taboo. When we're aware of taboos,
we can choose when to obey them, and when to be more flexible. When we're unaware of them, they can
limit our ability to change.
- The Ties that Bind
- Changing anything in an organization reveals how it's connected to its people, to its processes, to
its facilities, and to the overall context. Usually, these connections reach out much further into the
organization than we imagine.
- Good Change, Bad Change: II
- When we distinguish good change from bad, we often get it wrong: we favor things that would harm us,
and shun things that would help. When we do get it wrong, we're sometimes misled by social factors.
- The Restructuring-Fear Cycle: I
- When enterprises restructure, reorganize, downsize, outsource, spin off, relocate, lay off, or make
other adjustments, they usually focus on financial health. Often ignored is the fear these changes create
in the minds of employees. Sadly, that fear can lead to the need for further restructuring.
- Way Over Their Heads
- For organizations in crisis, some but not all their people understand the situation. Toxic conflict
can erupt between those who grasp the problem's severity and those who don't. Trying to resolve the
conflict by educating one's opponents rarely works. There are alternatives.
See also Organizational Change for more related articles.
Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout
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- And on April 10: Managing Dunning-Kruger Risk
- A cognitive bias called the Dunning-Kruger Effect can create risk for organizational missions that require expertise beyond the range of knowledge and experience of decision-makers. They might misjudge the organization's capacity to execute the mission successfully. They might even be unaware of the risk of so misjudging. Available here and by RSS on April 10.
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