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> Leaders should set a principle and expectation of a blameless culture. When something goes wrong, it’s a wonderful learning opportunity, to be studied and use

> Leaders should set a principle and expectation of a blameless culture. When something goes wrong, it’s a wonderful learning opportunity, to be studied and used to continuously improve. An example of this is the concept of a blameless post-mortem. I understand this idea. I've read several books on the subject and worked to integrate it into several teams now. I think it's an admirable goal. But the blameless culture idea becomes counterproductive when taken to extremes. I've been in a couple "blameless cultures" where a small number of people were clearly to blame for every project falling behind, but every retrospective was about how we could have organized our work better, or planned better, or been more clear about the expectations. No, at some point, the only way we're going to ship better is to shine some light directly at the one poor performer on the team that everyone knows is to blame. That doesn't mean being mean or rude or calling them out in public, but something must be done.

prsimp 4y ago
In my experience, there is a thin line between "blameless" cultures and "responsibility-less" cultures. Blameless cultures accept that we are all human, make mistakes, have off periods, etc. "Responsibility-less" cultures are as you describe -- they eschew honest conversations about the actual forces that affect projects. Instead they tend to repeat the same process discussions ad nauseum, typically discussing symptoms rather than the actual causes. Since we as humans often prefer to avoid conflict (sometimes at all costs), it's not uncommon to see companies tilt towards the latter. This is exacerbated in "scale up" environments when rapid personnel changes make it difficult to build the kind of trust necessary for direct, honest communication.
sophrocyne 4y ago
Create a culture where making mistakes is ok, but failing to learn from those mistakes is unacceptable. Not mine - That's a Dalio principle. But one that is very sorely needed in many work environments.
SkyPuncher 4y ago
Yea, that's a culture that lacks any sort of accountability. When patterns continue to repeat, one of two things needs to happen: * Management recognizes this is a culture/process issue which many people are affected by. Management must fix it. * An individual continues to repeat the same type of error, despite having had the opportunity to identify, learn, and address it.
deleted 4y ago
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__turbobrew__ 4y ago
Yea there is a balance between giving engineers power to effectively do their jobs and limiting the amount of damage they can do. You can put up more guard rails for engineers, but it will most likely make it harder to do their job or deal with production emergencies. What is also tough is if you have a group of highly privileged engineers who can manage not having guard rails except for a few cowboys who cause problems. You can limit the capabilities of the entire group to deal with the cowboys, but then you are making all of the responsible engineers less effective. One solution is to move the cowboys to a position where they can do less damage, another is to make the cowboys responsible for their repeat offences, or you can just go full up blameless and have to deal with outages caused by repeat offenders. I have seen this in action at my org — we basically have a chaos monkey who is a person. They cause an outage and not even a week later they are doing dumb/overly risky actions again.

prsimp 4y ago

In my experience, there is a thin line between "blameless" cultures and "responsibility-less" cultures. Blameless cultures accept that we are all human, make mistakes, have off periods, etc. "Responsibility-less" cultures are as you describe -- they eschew honest conversations about the actual forces that affect projects. Instead they tend to repeat the same process discussions ad nauseum, typically discussing symptoms rather than the actual causes. Since we as humans often prefer to avoid conflict (sometimes at all costs), it's not uncommon to see companies tilt towards the latter. This is exacerbated in "scale up" environments when rapid personnel changes make it difficult to build the kind of trust necessary for direct, honest communication.

sophrocyne 4y ago

Create a culture where making mistakes is ok, but failing to learn from those mistakes is unacceptable. Not mine - That's a Dalio principle. But one that is very sorely needed in many work environments.

SkyPuncher 4y ago

Yea, that's a culture that lacks any sort of accountability. When patterns continue to repeat, one of two things needs to happen: * Management recognizes this is a culture/process issue which many people are affected by. Management must fix it. * An individual continues to repeat the same type of error, despite having had the opportunity to identify, learn, and address it.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

__turbobrew__ 4y ago

Yea there is a balance between giving engineers power to effectively do their jobs and limiting the amount of damage they can do. You can put up more guard rails for engineers, but it will most likely make it harder to do their job or deal with production emergencies. What is also tough is if you have a group of highly privileged engineers who can manage not having guard rails except for a few cowboys who cause problems. You can limit the capabilities of the entire group to deal with the cowboys, but then you are making all of the responsible engineers less effective. One solution is to move the cowboys to a position where they can do less damage, another is to make the cowboys responsible for their repeat offences, or you can just go full up blameless and have to deal with outages caused by repeat offenders. I have seen this in action at my org — we basically have a chaos monkey who is a person. They cause an outage and not even a week later they are doing dumb/overly risky actions again.