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
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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:
Now We're in Chaos
- Among models of Change, the Satir Change Model has been especially useful for me. It describes how people
and systems respond to change, and handles well situations like the one that affected us all on September
Eleventh.
Pick-Up Sticks and the Change Game
- When we change organizational culture, we often stumble over unexpected obstacles. Sometimes the tangle
can be so frustrating that we want to start the company over again. Here are some tips for managing
large-scale cultural change.
Kinds of Organizational Authority: the Formal
- A clear understanding of Power, Authority, and Influence depends on familiarity with the kinds of authority
found in organizations. Here's Part I of a little catalog of authority classes.
The Passion-Professionalism Paradox
- Changing the direction of a group or a company requires passion and professionalism, two attributes
often in tension. Here's one possible way to resolve that tension.
Way Too Much to Do
- You're good at your job — when you have enough time to do it. The problem is that so much comes
your way that you can't possibly attend to it all. Some things inevitably are missed or get short shrift.
If you don't change something soon, trouble is sure to arrive.
See also Organizational Change for more related articles.
Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout
Coming June 1: Mental Accounting and Technical Debt
- In many organizations, technical debt has resisted efforts to control it. We've made important technical advances, but full control might require applying some results of the behavioral economics community, including a concept they call mental accounting. Available here and by RSS on June 1.
And on June 8: Flexible Queue Management
- In meetings of 5-30 participants, managing the queue of contributors can be challenging. A strict first-in-first-out order can cause confusion and waste of time if important contributions are delayed. Some meetings need more flexible queue management. Available here and by RSS on June 8.
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- A recording of a program presented June 24, 2020, Monthly
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- A recording of a program presented June 24, 2020, Monthly
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Webinar Series. PMI members can earn 1.0 Category 'A' PDU by viewing this program. View this program now.
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