In praise of blame

Like everyone, at times in my personal and professional life I have been involved in projects that go wrong. Very occasionally spectacularly wrong. Normally just not quite as well as hoped. When things do go wrong, one of things I really find difficult is participants immediately jumping to land the blame elsewhere. We often see this with very sensitive failures. In the UK, two recent very public failures where the acceptance of responsibility was an issue that spring to mind are the Post Office Horizon scandal and the Hillsborough football stadium disaster. I particularly hate it when senior people dodge blame, because that is training junior people that dodging the blame is OK, and even worse that ‘blame-dodging’ is a valuable skill that helps you get to and stay at the top. In contrast I just watched an interview with Jocko Willink, an ex-Navy Seal officer turned entrepreneur. He talked about successful teams he has led where everyone is almost fighting to take (their part in) the blame when things go wrong, and that great leaders set the tone for that. It is my sense that social media posts about topics like this are often overly ‘woke’, and talk a lot about blame-free cultures being awesome, and lamenting the fact that fear of blame stunts innovation. I definitely think areas of an organization where it is OK to fail (in certain ways) are really powerful. But not failing everywhere. And not every type of failure. And especially not failing to learn from (and hence not repeat) failures. (In fact, those areas where it is ‘OK to fail’, like R&D, what is being discussed is not really failing.) I also think that blame is an unhelpful word. Blame implies accusing someone of doing something bad or wrong. And the words bad and wrong have at least two meanings. One meaning is incorrect or unhelpful. The other is ethically or morally unacceptable, and sometimes connected to having bad intentions. So although I titled this post using that word, I don’t like the word blame, especially in business. I like clear lines of responsibility (it is clear who is tasked to do something) and accountability (it is clear who is responsible for the consequences). I suggest that having a culture where people proactively and consistently have accountability and take responsibility for mistakes and doing things wrong is critical, powerful and valuable in business and life. All errors in this post are mine and mine alone. #unthink #unask #unlearn #culture #innovation #failure