A few words about Blameless culture
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Re: A few words about Blameless culture
#2I like the essay. Unfortunately, too many people think “blameless” means no accountability for doing bad work.
Re: A few words about Blameless culture
#3> instead he quietly explained the process of determining root cause without assigning blame
Would love to know how this was explained. I wonder if the author remembers how it was put.
Re: A few words about Blameless culture
#4"The org’s leadership was clear that the individual was not fired for making the mistake, but for the attempted coverup."
Somehow I have a hard time believing that. The author using "individual" in prose is a give away for militaristic leadership style, where you quickly learn to cover up any mess up so the direct superiors don't lose face.
Blameless ...
Re: A few words about Blameless culture
#5Really enjoyed this too.
Most of all the author's gratitude toward the patient fire chief whose leadership example he praises.
We could do with more of this in cybersecurity.
We're all surrounded by insecure software and defective devices churned out by companies chasing a quick profit. We're mired in complexity, non-determinism and broken systems. The experts who designed them throw up their hands in confusion. And we're hamstrung with laws and policies, which despite their laudable intentions only beget twisted systems filled with perverse incentives and loopholes.
How do we solve this? Blame employees! And then humiliate them! Make our cyber team into a punitive, even vindictive internal police force?
Karen from HR is sobbing into her cardigan sleeve because ICT caught her out in a "Phishing drill". Now she'll have to go on a humiliating "this is how a computer works" course - despite the fact she was programming before her IT manager was born. No doubt she'll get her own back in time.
As ICT and cyber teams we could learn a lot from more traditional organisational culture.
Re: A few words about Blameless culture
#6I like the essay. Unfortunately, too many people think “blameless” means no accountability for doing bad work.
Would you mind elaborating? In particular, do you refer to the technical people ("no need to take care, even if I mess up no one will blame me") or the managers ("those cowards just want to avoid being accontable for their mistakes by blaming the process")?
My last company had a culture of blameless post mortems, and also a strong culture of accountability, so definitely no one would fit the first definition. And the company was too small to have non technical managers.
My current company (big corporation) officially supports blameless reaction to incidents, but internally has a strong culture of cover-up and blame ping-pong, but I still cannot think of anyone who would believe "blameless means no accountability". It just comes from deeply ingrained habits (lots of people do their whole career inside the company, lots of them even getting their masters at the company's own "university". Behavior is hard to change when everyone comes out of the same mould). I also think it comes from inadequate processes: where in the previous company the postmortem was mostly a meeting done by and for the technical team, my new company has a strong culture of "escalation meetings", where the highest managers quickly get drafted in, which obviously has a strong influence on the capacity to conduct an open and blameless process.
Re: A few words about Blameless culture
#7I like the essay. Unfortunately, too many people think “blameless” means no accountability for doing bad work.
I find most “philosophies” regarding work to be BS. Honestly most teams just get too big. People don’t know each other and this allows things to go unseen for too long. When people know one another and work together in real time, and have healthy relationships, they can then evaluate each other’s work, rely on each other, and generally get the job done with a minimum of fuss.
I fully understand that some people are not looking for that kind of thing at all. Many would rather be nameless cogs, and some would simply rather not do the work (technical or soft skills). That’s fine too. For that latter group, whatever the management buzz words de jour are are likely to be employed where you work sooner rather than later.
Re: A few words about Blameless culture
#8On my part I avoid any feelgooderies, and one should have a case in court on why a mistake took place.
Why it should not potentially affect compensations on progressions is beyond me. It might not as a singular event but but patterns of risky or disorganized behavior are commo rather than individual mistakes. Errors come in bulks but they might not express at the same time. In my experience there are people that do zero,every blue moon or infinite mistakes, and there are people that are good in zero,one or very many domains.
What an organisation needs for growth and coworkers need for sustainable stress reduction is the minimization of mistakes/output ratio.
If people get blamed a lot they switch to stereotypical behaviors and cant work in an innovative, creative fashion. A mistake took place? Is it institutional, personal? What other mistakes would present themselves if that mistake was a pattern? What is better for morale than finding another mistake due to analysis before it expresses itself?
Re: A few words about Blameless culture
#9On my part I avoid any feelgooderies, and one should have a case in court on why a mistake took place. Why it should not potentially affect compensations on progressions is beyond me. It might not as a singular event but but patterns of risky or disorganized behavior are commo rather than individual mistakes. Errors come in bulks but they might not express at the same time. In my experience there are people that do z…
But the blameless culture as highlighted in the article does not prevent to identify when someone messed up personally or is not doing effort to follow the process/bring the results. It means to start by assuming the best of intentions, and see how one can avoid repeating the same mistake in the future. See the example with the fire department in the article.
Note that you bring in the example of a court, and this is how a court works: a suspect is presumed innocent until proven otherwise.
The main point is that a blameless culture fosters honesty and team work. A blameful culture fosters covering up and lying to look good to the manager. But if someone is careless, they will get into trouble in both cases. See the example with the person who deleted the production DB: they would likely never have said "guys, drop everything you are doing, I deleted the prod database and need help" in a blameful environment - even though this is the best reaction to have for the business. But even in a blameless culture, it takes a lot of courage to admit such a mistake and ask for help. Assuming that people are not afraid to do such mistakes just because they will not be immediately fired for it is quite absurd.
Re: A few words about Blameless culture
#10I like the essay. Unfortunately, too many people think “blameless” means no accountability for doing bad work.
I find most “philosophies” regarding work to be BS. Honestly most teams just get too big. People don’t know each other and this allows things to go unseen for too long. When people know one another and work together in real time, and have healthy relationships, they can then evaluate each other’s work, rely on each other, and generally get the job done with a minimum of fuss. I fully understand that some people are n…
Ye when org. and team size grows "accountability" is not practical anymore since the decision makers have no clue who to blame in all but obvious cases. And the workers start to do what they get paid for, not what the nominal culture dictates.
My take is that it is probably better to accept bad workers in big orgs rather than trying to reach some kind of competence utopia, to get the incentives right.