[SilkRoadie]

I like the article and I have been promoting a blameless culture for most of my career. To respond rapidly to failings, we need transparency about what has happened. The same is required to ensure it doesn't happen again.

I have seen a lot of incidents and I cannot think of one where a single person was to blame. Sure, one person ran a command or made a bad commit. However, someone else granted them access, someone trained them. A manager either reviewed the process performed or never considered a process was required. A lot of company cultures do not promote proper risk management in technical processes.

I get a lot of satisfaction from technical post-mortems. There is always something that could have been done, a process that could have been in place or a software/infrastructure change to mitigate the problem.

A couple of companies have worked for have had individuals that did not subscribe to this culture. They would want a name. I never knew why exactly. Maybe it was to block a pay bump or defer a promotion. As the tech lead or dev manager any team failings are my responsibility and in companies where bullets are fired I take them. I find this protects the team and helps a blameless culture thrive amongst engineers.

Generally, I find this culture leads to fewer incidents and problems as the openness when things are going wrong allows for faster response times and software/process changes in review.

[galangalalgol]

I have worked years in a culture that attributes all mistakes to defects in the process. And the only possible individual mistake is not to follow the process. Process culture is just as bad as blame culture in some ways. It leads to ever more complex processes. The teams I've seen do best, the manager of the project will allow process to be informal and treated as best practices only. Then people are held accountable for bad results by putting them on tasks that can cause less damage. Good results mean more critical tasks. No single mistake kills a performance review or promotion, or makes one. We all make mistakes and get lucky. But over time reapeated mistakes or successes do have an impact.

[chfalck]

Process culture can be nice in the ideal scenario where the processes can have huge parts automated or programmatically guard railed. However, when that isn’t the case, I agree the paperwork barriers can get dreadfully tedious and introduce their own opportunities for mistakes

[zogrodea]

I like that perspective on the fundamental attribution error. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

[derbOac]

I've not heard of the idea of blameless culture, so I enjoyed reading this from that angle.

One of my worst and most consequential work experiences was with the opposite type of culture.

There's lots to be said about it, but in reflecting on things I've often felt like one of the worst parts of that type of culture ( "blameful"?) was a profound lack of trust, a feeling that the blame belied some lack of real interest in improving the situation, as opposed to being punitive against certain individuals for unrelated reasons. That is, the individuals who were targets of the most blame as far as I could tell were generally being targeted for cliquey reasons that had nothing to do with performance or anything of that sort. Conversely, people in the "in group" were given a free pass for all sorts of serious problems. Getting a free pass wasn't really the problem, it was a sense that blame wasn't really about the ostensible blameworthy act, it was that it was being meted out as a kind of superficial leverage for some other thing.

Also, because of these types of issues, serious, legitimate administrative, communication, and other systemic problems never got addressed, because the blame was being used as a kind of social ostracizing mechanism, and the actual underlying problems weren't fixed in their entirety. So in many ways a lot of the problems got worse, not better.

In contrasts, in other environments (even the same place at a different point in time) where there's an emphasis on problem solving and figuring out what could be done differently by everyone, and assuming the best intentions and basic competence, trust underlies everything. You're motivated more because you believe that actions have fair consequences, and that everyone has each other's best interests in mind.