The blame game: whose fault is it?

As the saying goes: Success has many parents, failure is an orphan. I’d take it a step further: when there is a failure, we go looking for the parents to see whose fault it is that the child turned out so badly. When things go wrong, our first instinct is to look for someone to blame.

Why? The answer is simple – if unexpected. Blame brings us amusement and enjoyment, because it satisfies, three psychological needs: safety, control and ego. Let’s look at each of these in turn:

1. Safety: Imagine you’re in a meeting where one of your colleagues, Nour, has messed up. From a personal safety point of view, in terms of staying in the boss’s good books and hanging onto your job, there are some good reasons to blame Nour. If Nour’s mistake takes up your boss’s time and energy, then the focus isn’t on you and you won’t be in the firing line. You’re safe, even if Nour is imperilled. Sorry, Nour.

2. Control: Blaming Nour also provides you with a sense of control. We’ve seen what happens and who’s responsible, and we’re pretty sure we won’t make a mistake like Nour’s next time around. So what once looked like a chaotic series of events now has a shape and a storyline, with Nour as the villain. If Nour isn’t someone we like very much, or who we feel has wronged us in the past, there might also be the satisfaction of revenge.

3. Ego: The principal reason we like blaming people is because it feeds our egos in two different ways. First, it enables us to bond with others. Nothing unites coworkers, friends, or strangers quite like a shared scapegoat. It’s tribal. It’s cathartic. We gather around the campfire of “not my fault” and warm ourselves with collective indignation. Second, blaming Nour reassures us of our own competence. Most of the time we don’t really know how we’re doing at work. But now, we do. We’re somewhere above Nour. This, then, helps reassure us that we’re capable of doing our job.

The cost of blame

This explains why we do it, but what of the consequences? For Nour, they’re pretty clear. At minimum, it’s being chastised in front of colleagues. That’s no fun, and any sensible person will seek to avoid it. They will either hide the mistake or try to offload responsibility onto someone else. When colleagues hear what happened to Nour, they’ll reach the same conclusion.

All of this means that more mistakes will go unreported and huge amounts of time and effort will be spent trying to shift responsibility elsewhere when eventually they are discovered. Sometimes these mistakes are caused by human frailty, such as tiredness or confusion. Sometimes they are errors of judgement, or are ethical in nature. They can be serious, and at an organisational level they can be costly in terms of reputation as well as the bottom line. Much as we enjoy the dramatic headlines when a rogue trader loses a bank millions or a company cheats on sustainability, we essentially want organisations to function properly and safely.

A better approach

In business, when something goes wrong, we theoretically want to do two things. One: fix whatever the problem is. Two: make sure that it doesn’t happen again. Does blame help with either of these? Not really. Potentially, the prospect of blame might mean that someone is less likely to do something wrong in future, knowing there are unpleasant consequences. More likely, as we’ve seen, the guilty party will conceal the error, or shuffle responsibility onto someone else.

Blame does nothing to fix the problem and may hinder us learning from it. What we need is to get a full view of the problem: not just what happened, but why it happened. Avoiding blame is not about letting people off the hook, indulging mistakes or tolerating sloppy work. It’s about seeking to understand. The mistake has occurred. What we now need to do is to make sure we get as much juice from this particular lemon as we can.

A great model here is aviation safety. A landing overrun (where the plane doesn’t stop soon enough) might be down to mechanical causes like brake failure, but could also be down to pilot error. Blaming the pilot won’t help improve safety. What will make the mistake less likely to happen again is understanding why the person made the error. To do that, we need to investigate the context in which it happened, which has many different factors – workload and scheduling rosters, interpersonal dynamics in the cockpit and so forth. Only by understanding these can we prevent the problem occurring in future.

How then can leaders ensure they are engendering a culture of accountability, rather than blame?

1. Cultivate a growth mindset. Frame any kind of failure as an opportunity to learn, rather than a cause for fear and blame. True failure is failing to drag anything useful out of the wreckage of our mistake.

2. If you’re a manager, get in the habit of underreacting, and pausing before you respond to any kind of news. Don’t voice the first thing that comes into your head, as that’s usually emotional and defensive. Wait for the second thing, which will be more deliberative and helpful.

3. Promote a just culture. In a just culture, people are encouraged to flag errors or potential errors. Individuals are not blamed for honest mistakes, but they are held accountable for wilful violations and gross negligence. They know where the line is between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour.

4. Create an environment of psychological safety, where people can talk about mistakes and concerns and ask questions. As Anna Mohl of Nestlé puts it, get them to “put the stinky fish on the table” so we can have a look at it and work out what to do with it.