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More to the point, people turn off their brains when they hear 'This was my fault'. They stop investigating further once the blame has been assigned. It's more
by jaggederest 14y ago
More to the point, people turn off their brains when they hear 'This was my fault'. They stop investigating further once the blame has been assigned.
It's more important to do the classic 'five whys' than to assign blame.
A scenario:
Maybe Joe forgot to do the maintenance task.
Maybe he forgot because he's been working overtime and is tired.
Maybe he's been working overtime because there aren't enough sysadmins.
Maybe there aren't enough sysadmins because hiring good sysadmins is difficult.
If you stop with just 'Joe's fault', you miss the point - time to spend some effort on recruiting new sysadmins. Worse, you might damage Joe's morale or even alienate him through punishment, even though that only makes the root cause worse.
- zaidf 14y agoSure, the way I see that in order for the 5 whys to work, you still need to know that Joe made the immediate mistake. Now, as part of the process, you create ways to prevent that mistake. When doing that preventative analysis, the other whys should pop up and the solution may well be something beyond Joe.
- jaggederest 14y agoRight my point is that saying 'It's Joe's fault' is wrong. The blame lies beyond him. It's cool to say 'he forgot to xxx' or 'he made a mistake and yyy', but to just categorically call it his fault is wrong.
- zaidf 14y agoIf the responsibility lies beyond him, then he shouldn't say it was his fault. You only say that if it was indeed your fault or you qualify how much of it was your fault.