Don't blame me it's not my fault

Sorry for not writing for a while, I have gone back to Uni part-time and that has been sapping my writing energy. The course is a Masters in Management - Strategic Foresight and I am finding it really, really good. We have covered some great work like Clare Graves' - Spiral Dynamics, Ken Wilber's Theory of Everything, Joe Voros's Generic Foresight Framework with his "Futures Cones" model - Projected, Probable, Possible, Impossible and Preferable futures.

Anyway, back to this post.

I was sitting next to an IT guy at a breakfast presentation the other day. He was explaining to me that he had just been told of a solution to a problem he had a couple of months back. He wished he had had that answer back when he needed it. What made my ears prick up was when he said, "if I had of known the solution and "they" hadn't of used it at least I could have said, "don't blame me, it's not my fault".

What strikes me with this example, and the many more we come across in our lives, is that instead of being worried about not achieving the desired outcome we seem okay if the end result fails as long as the blame is placed elsewhere.

I believe that this culture of feeling okay, as long as the blame is elsewhere, starts with the way we structure our organisations along functional lines and not along end outcomes. As long as I am performing my function it doesn't matter whether the total result is achieved or not. We seemed to have developed all sorts of ways to enforce this culture; silo measurements, departmental budgets, limited information sharing, etc. Just try to implement an end to end measurement system from the start of the value chain to the end and see what resistance you get.

A line I quote a fair bit is "success does not equal failure plus a story". Failure is failure no matter how much of a story we add to it to be able to say "don't blame me, it's not my fault".

Cheers,

Rob