Embracing a Blameless Culture: Because Nobody Wins the Blame Game

In a crisis people often start pointing fingers, but this is ultimately a self-serving and unproductive practice.

Bad things are going to happen. That is the nature of working in tech (or any industry for that matter). It will hit you no matter how good your planning, how much money you spend, or how big you grow. Even the big boys like Amazon and Google have outages.

So what is our response when we get smacked with a dreaded “oh crap” phone call at the worst possible time? This is such a defining moment for you as a leader. It sets the tone for your team on a very basic level.

Of course, the first order of business is fix the thing, but after you do (or after you’ve exhausted all options and the thing can’t be fixed)… what next?

For many companies the default seems to be identify who is to blame. Maybe the guilty party will even step up and call themselves out. Then you analyze the details of their failure, shame them sufficiently, and call it a day.

There are several problems with this approach. And because I love bullet points so much, let’s do it with dots:

• It is backwards looking. Other than seeing what we can learn from it, agonizing of the specific details and shaming the person doesn’t do anyone any good. Always have your focus forward.
• Its scope is too narrow. When we focus too much on the incident itself and how the guilty person caused it, we miss all the other causes behind that. You should ask why five times to find the real root cause. Often what or who we first think is the problem was a symptom not the cause.
• It kills team morale. By focusing on the negative and by calling someone out, often you create a team that is closed off and defensive. They get in cover your *** mode, will be quick to let others take the fall, and destroy the cohesiveness of your team.

So what should we do instead?

• Address it head on. While we don’t want to find someone to call out or be backwards looking, we also don’t want to sweep it under the rug. When we identify there is an issue or when an especially bad incident happens, address it as realtime as possible. Or schedule that post-mortem for one of the next two business days. Don’t wait. And don’t simply move on and pretend it didn’t happen after the initial resolution. Because if you do that it will happen again… and it will be worst next time. Count on it!
• Don’t let someone take the fall. In almost all cases, we all are partly responsible for the problem. It’s seldom one person’s fault. So when someone tries to fall on the sword, acknowledge they made a mistake but stop any talk about trying to assign a fall person or even spreading percentages of blame around. Leadership often has as much or more role in the ultimate root cause, so remember three fingers pointing back at you!
• Dive into what we can learn from it. Change the focus of the forensics from what went wrong to what can go right next time. What can we learn from the cascading causality of the problem? What will we implement next time to prevent it? What additional training can we give our engineers? How can we plan better or have another set of eyes to review these kinds of things in the future? What tests can we write to catch it? What other safety valves or redundancies can we implement?
• Once you find the answers, dig even further. Even once you have found the first cause and a couple after that, there are probably more. It might be a cultural issue to address. It could be overly aggressive deadlines or resource constraints. Maybe it’s incomplete specs or perhaps not having a full grasp on what the actual goal of the thing is. Don’t stop digging until you get to engineering leadership’s role in it, because all things ultimately trickle down from the top. Find what you can do to improve.

We are still learning how to do this better as we go. It takes practice to create this kind of attitude. But it’s so worth it. The team will gel, your team will be more transparent, and you’ll start addressing the real problems in productive ways that are proactive rather than reactive.

I hope you found this helpful. If so give it a 👏 (or 10) to show your love! And share your thoughts, experiences and observations in the comments.