Following unwanted outcomes, we often commission "lessons learned" exercises to investigate the conditions that brought about the unwanted outcomes. We want to learn how to prevent recurrences of those outcomes or any other unwanted outcomes that might flow from similar conditions. In too many organizations, these exercises yield useless or misleading results.
What we seek is Truth: the reasons why the unwanted outcome occurred. But these investigations rely on reports from people who participated in or witnessed events leading to the outcome. To find the truth we must interpret the reports we receive, and those reports can contain a variety of misleading elements. Here's a short catalog of those elements.
- Confusions and mistakes
- Relying on memory and impressions, witnesses and participants sometimes get it wrong. They get confused about the order of events, or who did what. They confuse what they actually witnessed with what they heard about second-hand.
- Excuses
- An excuse is a fact, condition, or situation that provides protection for someone from blame for the unwanted outcome. Excuses are those offerings that, if true, most people would accept as relieving someone of being regarded as having caused or contributed to causing the unwanted outcome.
- Allegations
- An allegation is the opposite of an excuse — it's a fact, condition, or situation that, if true, affixes to someone blame for the unwanted outcome. While excuses tend to be offered by the person excused, allegations tend to be offered by someone other than the one blamed.
- Omissions
- Reports that omit relevant information can also mislead investigators. Omissions can be intentional, but they need not be. They can result from numerous factors including faulty memory, emotional trauma, and poor technique by the investigator.
- Concealment
- Concealment To find the truth we must
interpret reports that can
contain a variety of
misleading elementstranscends intentional omission. It includes deliberate actions to deflect the investigator from the information concealed, such as destruction or obfuscation of information, or propagating false accounts of events. It can also include actions that make the information difficult to retrieve. For example, important witnesses might be relocated, terminated, or transferred. - Fabrications
- Fabrications are fictions intended to mislead the investigator. When well crafted and when delivered by someone who is unaware that they are fabrications, they are difficult to detect, because the deliverer isn't actually lying. Detecting them often requires tracing them to their source.
In determining who acted (or did not act) so as to contribute to the genesis of the unwanted outcome, there's a high risk that some witnesses and participants might experience the investigation as a search for someone to blame. The investigators themselves might adopt this belief.
In organizational cultures that tend to affix blame, investigations are unlikely to uncover much Truth, because people fear blame. Over time, people who don't master these tools for misleading investigations tend to be discredited, ejected from the organization, or allocated to less central roles. Organizations that want to improve outcomes would do well to eliminate blame from their cultures. Next in this series Top Next Issue
Are you fed up with tense, explosive meetings? Are you or a colleague the target of a bully? Destructive conflict can ruin organizations. But if we believe that all conflict is destructive, and that we can somehow eliminate conflict, or that conflict is an enemy of productivity, then we're in conflict with Conflict itself. Read 101 Tips for Managing Conflict to learn how to make peace with conflict and make it an organizational asset. Order Now!
For indicators that an organizational culture is a blaming culture, see "Top Ten Signs of a Blaming Culture," Point Lookout for February 16, 2005. The words blame and accountability are often used interchangeably, but they have very different meanings. See "Is It Blame or Is It Accountability?," Point Lookout for December 21, 2005, for a discussion of blame and accountability. For more on blaming and blaming organizations, see "Organizational Coping Patterns" and "Plenty of Blame to Go Around," Point Lookout for August 27, 2003.
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Related articles
More articles on Organizational Change:
- Don't Rebuild the Chrysler Building
- When we undertake change, we're usually surprised at the effort and cost required. Much of this effort
and cost is necessary because of the nature of the processes we're changing. What can we do differently
to make change easier in the future?
- Deciding to Change: Trusting
- When organizations change by choice, people who are included in the decision process understand the
issues. Whether they agree with the decision or not, they participate in the decision in some way. But
not everyone is included in the process. What about those who are excluded?
- How to Find Lessons to Learn
- When we conduct Lessons Learned sessions, how can we ensure that we find all the important lessons to
be learned? Here's one method.
- Motivation and the Reification Error
- We commit the reification error when we assume, incorrectly, that we can treat abstract constructs as
if they were real objects. It's a common error when we try to motivate people.
- Contrary Indicators of Psychological Safety: I
- To take the risks that learning and practicing new ways require, we all need a sense that trial-and-error
approaches are safe. Organizations seeking to improve processes would do well to begin by assessing
their level of psychological safety.
See also Organizational Change and Workplace Politics for more related articles.
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- And on March 27: Allocating Action Items
- From time to time in meetings we discover tasks that need doing. We call them "action items." And we use our list of open action items as a guide for tracking the work of the group. How we decide who gets what action item can sometimes affect our success. Available here and by RSS on March 27.
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