This is How Effective Leaders Move Beyond Blame

Next Big Sound's Head of Engineering Dave Zwieback cautions against the perils of blame — and shares how to circumvent them to build a more resilient company.

Here’s How to Break The Blame Game

When it comes to the importance of banishing blame from the organization, Zwieback likes to invoke technology journalist David Kirkpatrick. To paraphrase him: In a world consumed by software, your company is now a learning company, regardless of what industry you’re in. Pretending that it’s not spells serious peril. Zwieback’s counsel is meant to protect startups from this trap, by reprogramming their responses to setbacks and evolving traditional postmortems into “learning reviews.”

Don’t trade convenience for context.

For all the talk of disruption, companies frequently default to the path of least resistance when something goes awry. “Blame and biases — such as hindsight bias — give us a really convenient story about what happened in any negative situation. Cognitive science research shows us that to the extent that a story feels comfortable, we believe that it's true,” says Zwieback. “The reality is that when we get to that comfortable story we stop learning — we say ‘Oh that explains it.’ This short-circuits the learning process to alleviate discomfort of dealing with the complexity of systems — and organizations — that we’re building. That may be a short-term relief, but it’s a compounding expense over the long run because we’re not addressing areas of fragility.”

The only way to extract a full account of what happened is to remove blame and punishment from our retrospectives.

The way to reset that hardwiring is to remove fear and minimize biases that creep in during the investigation of failures. “Say there’s an incident and five minutes into the postmortem, we find out what happened and who’s responsible: Bobby and Susan screwed up. That feels good because there’s an unambiguous explanation: the so-called ‘root cause’. In this case, we’ve found our ‘bad apples,’ and can deal with them punitively so that such failures will never happen again. We may even feel better about our company culture and our colleagues if the individuals accept the blame and own up to what they did to ‘cause’ the incident,” says Zwieback.

The truth is that the most critical learning has been left on the table because we’ve overlooked the deeper context of the incident. “If we remove Bobby and Susan from the equation, could we be sure that the incident would never happen again? No. In all likelihood, the conditions that contributed to the negative outcome — that fragility that was necessary for the incident to occur — are still there. What’s worse, the two folks who know the most about these conditions — Bobby and Susan — are no longer there to help learn from this incident, and make the system more resilient. And others who have information that could materially improve future outcomes now have even more reasons to withhold it because they don’t want to be punished. That’s the problem with blame and punishment.”

If we want to make our systems and companies more resilient, we have to not wish away the failure, but learn and improve from it.

Prioritize learning with immunity over punishment.

The only way to establish real accountability is to move past blame and punishment on an organizational level. “This is a difficult task, but if you want people to be able to provide the full account of what happened — which is the very definition of accountability — you need to remove blame and punishment from the equation. Otherwise, folks are naturally disincentivized to share what they know...

To encourage honesty, we need safety. “It’s impossible to learn without all the data, without the full account of what happened. This is why information is more important than punishment,” says Zwieback. “It's counterintuitive but we can take a page from our justice system, which is quite concerned with punishment... Choose reconciliation over retribution when something goes wrong. You’re less likely to lose people and lessons.”

By shifting the role of the individual in an incident from suspect to witness, the process of learning what happened becomes inclusive and far richer.

Ditch postmortems for learning reviews.

The first step to banishing blame to make your startup more resilient is to swap out the traditional postmortem. Instead, Zwieback and his partner Yulia Sheynkman have developed the following three-step framework to help companies institute learning reviews. Here’s how:

Set the context.

At many companies, postmortems are only conducted at the end of projects in order to outline and analyze the factors that contributed to their failure... Learning reviews can be conducted after each experiment or iteration and are designed to facilitate learning from both failures and successes.

...Most importantly, remind your team over and over again that they’re part of a learning organization...

Here are Zwieback’s and Sheynkman’s tenets to help keep your company focused on setting the context to maximize learning:

• The purpose of the learning review is to learn so that we can improve our systems and organizations. No one will be blamed, shamed, demoted, fired, or punished in any way for providing a full account of what happened.
• We’re likely working within complex, adaptive systems, and thus cannot apply the simplistic, linear, cause-and-effect models to investigating trouble within such systems.
• Failure is a normal part of the functioning of complex systems. All systems fail—it’s just a matter of time.
• We seek not only to understand the few things that go wrong, but also the many things that go right, in order to make our systems more resilient.
• The root cause for both the functioning and malfunctions in all complex systems is impermanence.
• Human error is a symptom—never the cause—of trouble deeper within the system.
• While conducting the learning review, we will fall under the influence of cognitive biases.

Build a timeline.

A timeline should represent an account of what happened as determined by the people who were involved and impacted.

...Follow these three principles to construct a robust timeline:

• Ask each individual involved to share what they knew, when they knew it and how they knew it.
• Encourage and protect diverse points of view.
• Reframe the facilitator's role.

Close the loop.

Closure is of utmost importance for a learning review. The first step is to determine and prioritize remediation items. “It’s essentially ranking the steps that should be taken to change the conditions that ‘hosted’ the incident in the first place... Lastly, the facilitator must publish the learning review write-up as widely as possible...

Tying it Together

There are enough pressures that can overheat startups: fundraising, recruiting talent, battling market entrants, hitting sales targets. So, when something goes wrong, why blame individuals for failures and accelerate internal combustion? Instead, rally the team to get a holistic snapshot of the conditions — not the culprits — that led to an outcome.

“The failure rates of companies are too high to sabotage your organization from the inside. Startups need to learn fast and adapt to survive, and blame and bias short-circuits any real learning,” says Zwieback.