Complex, consequential and time-sensitive problem-solving is best done in the atmosphere of full transparency. Alleviating fear of blame and sanctions is essential for having an honest conversation, taking social and technical risk, and otherwise focusing on doing valuable and creative work, rather than avoiding negative consequences. Not fearing consequences unleashes creativity and striving for better results, even if it involves risk, is correlated with great success in high-tech.
Sanction-less and blameless are both good, but not identical ideas.
Sanction-less means that those decided to be at fault are not going to be sanctioned – written up, demoted, fired, or otherwise punished. Sanction-less must come from the very top of the organization to be trustworthy, and is fairly clear-cut. The promise of “no punishment” can still be broken at any time, but in many organization past history tends to be a reasonably good indicator of the future behavior. If the management promises “sanction-less”, and has not levied sanctions for mistakes leading to serious and costly incidents in the past, it is likely that the next incident investigation will adhere to the same policy.
Blameless is more complicated.
Blame is a social construct, and involves interpersonal relationships, rather than company policy. Blame can be levied by any person involved in the situation, from the team members to stakeholders to users to bystanders. While blame can be accepted or not by the person who is being blamed, the blame is created by the person or people doing the blaming. It is easy to create blame – all it takes is one person, with any title, role or level of involvement. Once created, blame does not go away. It can slowly fade with time, it can also turn around on the people doing the blaming if it becomes known that the blame was created in error. Blame often continues to affect relationships and interactions for a long time, even the relationships that were created after the blame first came into existence.
Blame is a natural human reaction in response to a negative situation. While the goal of dealing with an incident is to recover and, if possible, to make up for lost value, people typically want to know what caused the problem, and who is at fault. With wanting to know who is at fault comes the propensity to blame the negativity of the event on that person or people.
Is it possible to get away from the blame, and to create a blameless culture?
There are a couple of ways. One is explicit and relentless focus on group responsibility, so that personal responsibility is forcibly completely disregarded. While actions are taken by specific people, it is possible to gather all accountability at the team level. As causes of the problem are discovered, ignore the name or names attached to the action that created them to the best of your ability, to avoid blaming these people.
The other way to avoid blame is to focus on the future rather than the past. Do not look for the cause of the problem. Instead, look for a way to solve the problem going forward. Work from the solution, rather than the cause, to make changes needed to avoid the same or similar problems in the future. The benefit of this approach is that all the effort goes into resolving the existing situation, rather than discovering and evaluating the past.
Blameless culture is not easy. Problems can be severe, emotions can run high, and searching for cause is deeply ingrained into our understanding of how work should get done. In addition, our tools are great at keeping logs on who did what and when.
Knowing who caused the problem is synonymous with assigning blame. It is human nature to judge, to evaluate, to critique, and, yes, to blame. It is also human nature to guard against blame-inviting behavior, and not only we try to do well, we also try hard to hide what we did less well. A lot of effort and cognitive strain goes into avoiding and escaping blame, however futile.
Achieving blameless culture allows to avoid this waste, and more fully focus on other goals. Consciously working toward minimizing blame promotes healthier relationships, better emotional experience overall and specifically while dealing with severe incidents, and encourages more honesty and transparency.
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