Moving from Blame to Accountability (2017)

https://thesystemsthinker.com/moving-from-blame-to-accountability/

by yamrzou • 3 years ago

95 48 3 years ago

outlace• 3 years ago

This is focused on organizations but I will emphasize how moving from blame to accountability (or ownership) is a transformative stance for ourselves as individuals (as described in Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink). We often try to protect our egos by shifting blame, making excuses or just avoiding challenges altogether because blame and failure are such a negative experience. But instead of self-blame if you instead decide to take ownership, where you take responsibility for everything in your world, it becomes a kind of game of how you can level up to better master the world. You also focus on where you want to go and how to get there and stop beating yourself up for not being there already. Mistakes stop being so painful and instead become welcome gradient signals to level up. You start seeking out challenges to acquire more skills to get where you want to go.

FooBarBizBazz• 3 years ago

Ultimately, if you are "accountable" for everything in the world, then what you must do is establish control over everything in the world. Anything that cannot be controlled must be shackled and harnessed. Any independent behaviors by others must be extinguished; they must be turned into compliant automatons to be pushed this way or that by force. Nature also must be eliminated. It is illegible; you cannot understand or control it; it has to be paved over so that a Cartesian grid of parking spaces can be painted on it. Anyone who isn't you must be in chains.

alexjplant• 3 years ago

Ultimately, if you are "accountable" for everything in the world, then what you must do is establish control over everything in the world.

This seems rather extreme. To me "accountable" means "accountable for your _reaction_" in this context. I don't think (or at least hope that) anybody advocating this stance is seeking to "eliminate nature" so much as accept it as it is and deal with it on a realistic basis.

As an illustrative example I ride motorcycles on the street. It is a fact of nature that people are going to try and merge into me or cut me off and threaten my life. Blaming them and being angry about it leads to poor outcomes in the form of aggressive and dangerous riding. Instead I focus on mitigating risk by wearing appropriate safety gear and anticipating bad drivers' actions so as to avoid it. I do not seek to control others so much as to maximize the value of my interaction with them by taking ownership of it.

diatone• 3 years ago

Everything in your world. You decide on the system boundaries. If you haven’t already I’d recommend watching the accompanying TED talk

number6• 3 years ago

I take the bait: of course you can't control the weather. So you plan to hiking, so instead of getting soaked when it rains — you can pack an umbrella or a poncho.

So who's fault is it that you got wet? The weather? Was there nothing that could have been done?

Maybe it's your responsibility to plan for bad weather?

tmn• 3 years ago

What is the purpose of this type of reductionist poopooing? Are you advocating that accountability is undesirable? Of are you just flexing your intellect?

The basic flaw in this thought exercise of yours is, no one is actually '"accountable" for everything' with the power or desire to enact the consequences you listed. That said, there is nothing wrong with modeling that I am accountable for everything and accepting chaos theory as a unavoidable attribute of the world. This means that me being accountable and things going wrong does not necessitate any of the things you listed "independent behaviors by others must be extinguished" as this is just a sociopathic way of thinking on the path to destruction.

makeitdouble• 3 years ago

I see a lot of value in this take, and think pushing it to an extreme helps highlight the balancing act that is required.

Also GP's point refers to "Extreme Ownership" by Jocko Willink, and from that title it looks fair to effectively imagine the extreme.

GP mentions how focusing on accountability changes the approach to failures, and I'd totally see people taking the wrong lessons from a project where they didn't stop a colleague from doing something that happened to be a bad decision.

landemva• 3 years ago

Anyone who isn't you must be in chains.

You speak for yourself, not for me.

Those different than me often contribute in ways I did not see. Life is better when I embrace improvement.

candiddevmike• 3 years ago

This seems like a great way to develop or exasperate mental illnesses like OCD.

ghgdynb1• 3 years ago

you may mean exacerbate

nimbius• 3 years ago

I think the takeaway consideration is to select products services and solutions that aren't predicated on an assignment of blame or responsibility, but based on your own accountable understanding of risk as it applies to business and processes.

Far too often are we outsourcing in order to avoid the difficult and often times very wholistic concern of risk and outcome. Blame serves no shareholder value but to abdicate leadership from their post.

123pie123• 3 years ago

I'm accountable or 'own' my designs end to end. which means I want and need to help the people or experts who should know their job (who sometimes give BS)

Yes I write highlevel risks about the information I'm given could be wrong (to cover my backside) but you have to be thorough. Its makes you a better technical person or a better engineer. where by you dissect and rebuild information given to check it's right and to spot inconsistanses.

It's like solving a puzzle, but like a good puzzle it can be sometimes tedious, slow and time consuming. but when you find issues that could cost hundreds of thousands of pounds/ dollars through mistakes it really makes up for it.

austin-cheney• 3 years ago

I can speak to this. In one life I am a part time military officer with 5 deployments to the Middle East. At the exact same time I am a corporate software developer for my primary career. The greatest difference between these worlds is:

Leadership

Ownership is certainly a primary part of that, but there is more to this than what most people from the corporate world can envision unless if you have been at a director level (or higher) in a company that is more than a start up.

Ownership directly implies liability. If you fail wrongly this can mean losing your job, permanently losing your career, losing personal money, or even going to prison depending upon the context. Many professions have that, but software does not. In fact software directly stresses the opposite of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35889282

Leadership means to own risks and liability, but it also means owning the welfare of the people that work for you. Another primary part of leadership, equivalent to ownership, is communication. Good communication comprises the ability to provide specific instructions to subordinates so that they never must ask for clarity, as though you are using empathy to read their minds. Simultaneously it also means the ability to persuade peers and superiors to change position on an opinion beneficial to your team/mission. If you are good at this it will appear almost invisible to your staff and exceedingly self-sacrificing to your superiors.

wouldbecouldbe• 3 years ago

It's both, there are definitely organisations where there is blaming.

But it's also very hard for individuals to not feel blamed when given feedback meant for improving the process.

rainsford• 3 years ago

It's definitely a challenge for many if not most people to receive constructive feedback, but my observation has also been that few places are actually good at putting such feedback in a context that actually feels constructive and intended to improve outcomes. Even the most well-intentioned feedback feels negative when it appears to suggest individual level improvement is the solution to larger issues. And my observation has been that many problems in organizations are about more than individual need for improvement.

A fairly common example I like that you've probably heard before is variations on the story of a junior engineer accidentally dropping a production database. Any feedback to that junior engineer about what they need to improve on to avoid doing that in the future is going to feel like blame no matter how it's given since the underlying causes of the problem are at least as much organizational ones.

Throw73849• 3 years ago

I will take blame over accountability. Being accountable is a lot of work, that is rarely rewarded. And blame usually does not have any real consequences.

jmbwell• 3 years ago

In some cases, it’s true; taking some blame in the short term can be better in the long run than dealing with the reactionary processes and solutions of “accountability.”

UweSchmidt• 3 years ago

Quaint. Who's really blaming anyone these days? Vice-presidents maneuvering for power aren't trying to blame honestly in the first place, and the old-school bosses who'd call you into their office are retired by now. Modern organizations have Scrum Masters and Business Analysts with no disciplinary responsibility. In general, the appeal to universal truths on which to measure the individual is going out of style, and if you blame too much people will take it to Twitter or leave (exagerrating a little).

Workplace dysfunction (including the blame- and accountability issues from the article) is either coming from issues your boss knows about and can't fix, or considers acceptable, and either way you better work within the given constraints. Any solution about a griefing neighboring department will likely come through some tacit reorganizations when management reshuffles.

Not saying there is anything wrong in particular with the article, or that working through the article can't help if you truly want to reform a team; however such a task will require a manager with sufficient leadership skills and intuition about the true nature of an organization. Such a manager would better not put up powerpoint slides about the difference between blame and accountability at the end of the next daily standup. It's the intangible sprinkling of management magic that makes each team member feel understood and challenged to do better, and the diplomat's skill of negotiating a truce with the enemy within the company that no systems-thinking-article can teach.

JanisErdmanis• 3 years ago

Tangentially, as nonnative speaker I really appreciate and envy that in english there is a clear separation between concepts of accountability and responsibility. I wish more languages would do so apart from English, Japanese as ChatGPT have listed.

dingledork69• 3 years ago

Dutch has that distinction as well. Shows you not to trust ChatGPT.

AtlasBarfed• 3 years ago

Does ChatGPT ever say "I don't know"?

geraldwhen• 3 years ago

Some parts of big organizations are absolute rot, though. They fail to deliver, deploy broken software, and can’t be relied upon to ever succeed at their jobs.

I have no power to fire other groups, but what I can do is list all the ways the other group will fail and how we have to handle their failures and what that means for the customer. Those groups will never improve, but because I look like a soothsayer, I will get rewarded and promoted.

Is this healthy for the org? Of course not. But I am not the org. If anyone had my insight a few levels up, they would fire incompetent teams and let teams with proven track records take over. I’ve never seen this happen, so I’ll hold my breath.

yobbo• 3 years ago

Article is trying to support a normative argument, which is fair and seems correct, with minutia in word definitions and different levels politeness.

Accountability is synonymous with responsibility. Identifying who is responsible for a failure is synonymous with blaming. We prefer to use "hold accountable" in formal and polite settings, and "blame" in informal settings, but it has the same meaning.

Using the correct level of politeness and formality is a hygiene factor.

"There has been a failure in accountability, and we're looking into preventing in the future" can be equivalent to (informally and impolitely) "someone here isn't cutting it and we need to figure who that is so we can start getting rid of him".

What the article actually means is that the consequences for failures in accountability should be measured such that it encourages learning, and disclosing problems, and so on. But this needs to happen through demonstrated actions, not language. It's actually preferable to be blunt, honest, and fair: "someone here fucked up; if you can figure who did what, fix it, and coach everybody up on how to prevent it, you will be more respected. if you hide your mistakes you will be less respected, and eventually of little use here."

atoav2• 3 years ago

It is crucial to not forget that sometimes theblame is in the system itself.

If you e.g. push your employees over the limits and tell them to ignore all kinds of reasonable safeguards and regulations. And then, one day, after a ton of near misses Joe slips and falls into the meatgrinder, it would be very easy to blame Joe for skipping the safeguards.

But the true reason for the accident was the environment and culture Joe had to work in and it might have also hit a random different person.

joe_the_user3• 3 years ago

Absolutely,

The most evil variation of this is "we'd rather have the increased productivity than spend the resources to actually avoid X so our guidelines say they're to avoid X but really they're to blame a line worker when X happens so we can keep saying we don't want X". See the rash of train derailments and toxic spills we're lately now that railroads have imposed "precision railroading/precision crew scheduling".

whitemary• 3 years ago

Are you joking? In your example, the responsible party is the boss, not "environment and culture."

joe_the_user3• 3 years ago

One factor with informal blaming is it makes it easier for it to be done to whoever has less power or whoever is less popular, etc. And this naturally leads to people just acting defensively rather than making an effort to avoid a given problem. At worst, people can incentivized to make other people screw-up, 'cause when other people are being blamed for X, you can't be blamed for Y.

A formal blaming process means that the question of who to blame is decided objectively and people have more of an incentive actually act correctly.

And as others mention, blaming the process itself is reasonable.

And you're right that the article itself only presents accountability as essentially greater politeness.

jrumbut• 3 years ago

A formal blaming process means that the question of who to blame is decided objectively and people have more of an incentive actually act correctly.

I am not sure the creation of a formal process (created by those who have the power to create formal processes) is inherently more fair to those without power than an informal process.

Especially if formality is confused for objectivity or correctness. The latter two are likely impossible for human beings to acheive, so a starting point for a better process is going to be recognizing that the it is going to be affected by the blindspots, flaws, and other foibles of the people who created it.

msla• 3 years ago

Similar is the distinction between reasons and excuses: The words are synonyms, except to the extent an excuse is a reason I don't like.

BeetleB• 3 years ago

When something goes wrong in an organization, the first question that is often posed is, “Whose fault is it?”

Pro tip: If you have a manager who acts like this, or even worse, an org, then it is best to find a better work environment. Having said that, these scenarios tend to be in the minority.

One of my best jobs had the department head say to his staff when things go wrong: "I don't want to hear X screwed up. I want to hear why we allowed X to screw up". Why could a junior employee make a change that affects the whole org? What systems are not in place to prevent this? Etc.

markrages• 3 years ago

This is how layers of process accrete around an organization, each to address a previous screwup. Until nothing gets done at all, except fulfilling the requirements of the process.

There is a tradeoff between frequency and severity of screwups and rate of progress. This tradeoff should be made deliberately; just going from "screwups always bad" will not reach the best balance for the health of the organization.

jimbokun• 3 years ago

Adding more layers of process is not how you prevent the same kind of screw up from occurring.

A better approach is to automate the process in a way that the manual mistake is no longer possible.

leobg• 3 years ago

I find out interesting how the word responsibility is rooted in “to respond”. Responsible is not the person who is to be punished for what happened, but who is able to respond to it, i.e. make the best out of it.

This etymology also works in other languages - for instance, in German: “Ver-Antwort-ung”.

kubanczyk• 3 years ago

That's a generous interpretation. My take is that that person must respond to grievances in all sorts of ways, and if nothing can be repaired at least make the situation bearable by lowering their own status.

ChrisMarshallNY• 3 years ago

I used to work for a Japanese corporation.

When something went wrong, and it was my fault, I was expected to take accountability. This was rewarded by not having folks try to smear or attack me. It was a simple statement of fact. We found the problem, and took steps to mitigate (which could include removing me from the project).

No rancor, no name-calling, no status games.

Needless to say, this did not translate to the American management, who liked to do a sack dance.

Afton• 3 years ago

I know American management isn't a monolith, but over the course of my career, I have gotten extremely good play by educating people about blameless RCAs both for myself and my chain below, and across chains. Once I make it clear that the goal is to understand how this happened, and how to make it not happen again (or at least how to think about the risk-vs-cost calculation), most people would get onboard.

I've on occasion also educated up the chain on why attacking someone is an anti-pattern. If you can get the higher-ups onboard, then attacks tend to be viewed as a problem in and of themselves. Or, and this is certainly possible, I'm incredibly naive and have just been very lucky.

KineticLensman2• 3 years ago

I’ve worked in organisations that distinguish between responsibility and accountability. If a manager assigns a task to someone then that person is responsible for it. However, the manager may be accountable if something goes wrong, e.g. if the person isn’t correctly trained.

ebiester• 3 years ago

For people interested in this, look at the RACI framework. https://project-management.com/understanding-responsibility-... - I don't see it used in a way of moving away from a blame culture, but more when an organization has tasks falling in between the gaps.

KineticLensman2• 3 years ago

Yes, RACI is exactly what I was thinking about. The differences also get people excited when they apply to delivery and funding. If you suggest that someone is accountable for a project then they may suddenly get very interested in it. RACI is also a very good way of identifying different types of stakeholder, e.g. when considering their potential roles with respect to a new project or capability.

TeeWEE• 3 years ago

I think accountability is in a different dimension than blame. The antonym of accountability is irresponsibility or indifference.

The opposite of blame seeking is in my opinion embracing failure and understanding (as an org) that innovations and progress is made by the willingness to fail.

Seeing failure as the result of hard work, a necessary evil, causes blame seeking to vanish imho. Together with accountability this sets the organization op for incremental improvement. Never blame a person. Blame the system or process. The one we made up together.

trabant00• 3 years ago

The hubris in thinking arguing semantics will fix organizational problems.

The real difference is made by the kind of people who interpret mistakes and respond to them. They need to have passion for the job, be perfectionists who search to improve their output and who take negative feedback as valuable information. That's partly nature, partly nurture, but by the time the people get a job it's way too late to fix anything, let alone by using one word instead of another.

dclowd9901• 3 years ago

Devil’s advocate question: does a blameless culture account for malicious or negligent behavior of an individual?

jasonwatkinspdx2• 3 years ago

A book I like on this general topic is The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error by Sidney Dekker.

He's writing from the perspective of investigations after airliner crashes. His core point is that you shouldn't be looking for who to blame in a punitive sense (assuming nothing malicious has happened), but rather how policies and procedures allowed the error to happen. The human is just the last domino in the chain. Accountability ultimately lives with management that establishes policies and procedures. But management often does't like that idea, because yelling loudly and sacking someone feels like you're being proactive, even though in the net it makes another error more likely.

tashian• 3 years ago

I loved this podcast episode on the same topic: https://www.reboot.io/episode/wisdom-for-work-13-accountabil...

Moving from Blame to Accountability (2017)

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