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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. |