On Replacing Blame with Learning

This Week’s Topic: The Blameless Post-Mortem

1 Strategy 🎯 

This past Monday I had one of those days.

I was feeling sluggish and just could not get in the groove. I had a lot to do, and no motivation to do it.   

As I thought for a moment about the root cause of my malaise, the answer hit me. 

It's my wife's fault!

Here me out. 

She suggested we go out for ice cream the night before…and eating all that sugar so late made it hard to get to sleep…which caused me to sleep in late and miss my morning workout…

And THAT is why I feel like crap.  

Clearly my wife owes me an apology, right??

Of course not - blaming my wife for my bad day is ridiculous. And thankfully my rational brain immediately stepped in and called bullsh*t on that narrative. 

So let’s talk about blame:

• Why is it so effortless to blame others when things go wrong?

• What happens to team performance when a culture of blame takes over?

• When things do go wrong, how can we learn and grow from mistakes without playing the blame game?

Humans are wired to blame.

When things go wrong, it's in our nature to blame other people or circumstances.  It often happens unconsciously and automatically.

Humans are storytelling machines and, if you're anything like me, when something goes wrong you can effortlessly craft a compelling story that paints you as the victim of someone else's wrongdoing or, at a minimum, completely blameless.

Research also shows us that blaming behavior is strongly correlated with an inability to regulate negative emotions and it can serve as a convenient defense mechanism, allowing us to shifting responsibility when we’re stressed or overwhelmed.

In a team environment, routinely singling out and criticizing individuals for mistakes can have disastrous effects on team culture and performance, often resulting in:

• More turnover

• Less engagement

• Decision escalation (shifting decisions to managers)

• Lower levels of innovation and creativity

A high-blame culture also encourages team members to hide their mistakes, which can cause minor issues to snowball into major incidents.    

Mistakes happen.

And most mistakes are caused by system failures, not individual failures. 

As W. Edwards Deming, the godfather of Continuous Quality Improvement famously said, "Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets".

The best way to prevent your team from repeating mistakes is by replacing blame with intentional feedback and learning.

The Blameless Post-Mortem is a powerful process for doing just that.

The Blameless Post-Mortem consists of 3 key steps:

1. RECAP the event (learn what happened)

2. REFLECT on behaviors and reactions (learn why it happened)

3. IMPROVE based on learnings (make a plan to prevent it from happening again.

You can download the template here.

Regardless of the tool or process, post-mortem sessions can be difficult and emotions may run high. 

Make it easier by using a collaborative and structured process that focuses on fixing systems, rather than blaming individuals.

Did this week’s topic resonate with you? Hit ‘reply’ and let me know!

Need help running a post-mortem session with your team? Book a free consultation and let’s talk about it!

See you next Wednesday,

Darin

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