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Moving from Blame to Accountability (2017)

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Re: Moving from Blame to Accountability (2017)

#41

Post by jimbokun »

markrages wrote: post #25
BeetleB wrote: post #17

> 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…

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.

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.

Re: Moving from Blame to Accountability (2017)

#42

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

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.

Re: Moving from Blame to Accountability (2017)

#44

Post by jmbwell »

Throw73849 wrote: post #6

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.

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.”

Re: Moving from Blame to Accountability (2017)

#45

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #19
dingledork69 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

When you ask stuff that has a specific answer that's easy to google for, but for whatever reason ChatGPT doesn't have that in its internal model, it'll fall back on telling you when it was last updated and that it may not have the most recent info.

Re: Moving from Blame to Accountability (2017)

#46

Post by msla »

yobbo wrote: post #15

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…

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.

Re: Moving from Blame to Accountability (2017)

#47

Post by Afton »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #21

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 t…

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.

Re: Moving from Blame to Accountability (2017)

#48

Post by jrumbut »

joe_the_user wrote: post #38
yobbo wrote: post #15

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…

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 th…

> 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.

Re: Moving from Blame to Accountability (2017)

#49

Post by atoav »

whitemary wrote: post #40
atoav wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cultur…

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

Guess who is responsible for overseeing/establishing that environment and structure?

Also: A organization can have foggier responsibility structures than "the boss says $X which is why $X is done".

E.g. you could have a boss who says safety is truly important and even does a ton to help with that, while lower management is so obsessed with other metrics that they sabotage that on a conscious or subconscious level while emulating compliance to their higher ups.

This is very common.

The "evil boss"-scenario is the simple one where it should be very clear that Joe is not to blame. This is precisely why it is important to also look at less clear ones where it would be easy to blame the accident on individual human error — instead of finding the actual root causes.

Re: Moving from Blame to Accountability (2017)

#50

Post by joe_the_user »

jrumbut wrote: post #48
joe_the_user wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> 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 a…

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.

A formal process isn't inherently more fair. It's only potentially more fair. You need to look in detail at the process to see if it's more fair.

The rest of your argument is a bit like arguing mathematics won't help you build a bridge - "The math could wrong and the user could be biased and even the best can't reflect reality exactly".

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