Off With Their Heads
In Tudor England, getting on the wrong side of the powerful could be dangerous. You could lose your job, your property and, in some cases, your head. If something went wrong, finding someone to blame was a useful activity. The king was unhappy. Someone had to pay. Perhaps they had made a mistake. Perhaps they had simply fallen out of favour. Either way, off with their heads!
Thankfully, most organisations have stopped chopping off people's heads. We have HR departments now. Much safer. Usually.
But we have not completely abandoned the principle. Something goes wrong. A project fails. A target is missed. A complaint arrives. An inspection goes badly. A serious mistake is made. Suddenly, everyone becomes very interested in who was responsible.
There is an investigation. There are meetings. There are statements. There may even be a “lessons learned” review. Sometimes the lesson learned is remarkably simple: it was Dave's fault. Dave leaves. Everyone feels better. Problem solved.
Except it isn't.
There is nothing wrong with accountability. People should take responsibility for their actions. Poor performance should have consequences. Serious mistakes cannot simply be waved away. But accountability and blame are not the same thing. Accountability asks, “Who was responsible?” Blame asks, “Who can we blame?” They sound similar. They are not.
Accountability is about responsibility and learning. Blame can become about self-protection. Finding the person responsible can become the end of the investigation rather than the beginning. Once someone has been identified, disciplined or removed, everyone else can breathe a sigh of relief. The organisation can say that action has been taken.
But the harder question is, “What allowed this to happen?”
Perhaps the process was badly designed. Perhaps staff were under pressure. Perhaps warnings were ignored. Perhaps targets encouraged the wrong behaviour. Perhaps several people knew there was a problem but nobody felt able to stop it. The person may have made the mistake. But the organisation may have made the mistake possible.
Blaming Dave may be easier than asking why five other people saw the problem and did nothing. It may also be easier than asking whether the system, the process or the culture helped create the conditions for failure.
Sometimes the person who gets blamed is not the person the organisation most needs to question.
That is when accountability can turn into a human sacrifice. Not literally, obviously. Someone is investigated. Someone is disciplined. Someone loses their job. The organisation can then say that something has been done. The board is reassured. The public is reassured. Staff are reassured. Everyone can move on.
Except the same conditions that caused the failure may still be there. The process is still broken. The target is still unrealistic. The workload is still excessive. The warnings are still being ignored.
The person has gone. The problem hasn't.
There is another danger. If people know that mistakes lead to punishment, they become very good at hiding them. Don't be the person who brings bad news. Don't put your hand up. Don't admit the mistake. And, above all, don't leave a paper trail.
People learn to protect themselves. Bad news travels slowly. Problems are reported late. Small problems become big problems because nobody wants to be the person who says, “We have a problem.” You can end up with an organisation where people are excellent at avoiding blame but terrible at preventing failure.
A blame culture can produce more blame and fewer lessons.
So when something goes wrong, ask two questions: who was responsible, and what allowed this to happen? The first identifies accountability. The second identifies organisational learning. You need both.
The Tudors had a simple way of dealing with inconvenient people: off with their heads!
Modern organisations are more civilised. We have investigation reports, disciplinary procedures and action plans. But sometimes the principle is remarkably similar. Find the guilty person. Remove them. Declare the matter closed.
The quickest way to make a problem disappear is to find someone to blame. The harder thing is to discover why the organisation allowed it to happen.
So, when something goes wrong, are you looking for the truth, a lesson, or simply a head to put on the chopping block?
blairmcpherson.co.uk
