Beyond Blame

Chapter 17. The Town Hall

The auditorium was at full capacity. It could barely contain the entire New York I.T. group, and engineers from remote locations joined via videoconference. On the raised stage at the front of the room, Roger was seated at the table covered with the blue tablecloth. Raj and Ollie sat on his left side, Bill and Linda on his right. There was an echoing ping sound and buzzing across the room—the calendars on the computers and smartphones reminding those in attendance that the meeting was starting. Ever punctual, Roger cleared his throat, and moved the microphone closer.

“Welcome, everyone. Thank you for taking the time out of your busy day to be here. I’d like to talk about the outage that happened a few weeks ago.”

Roger paused, noting the tension in the room. He took a deep breath. “I, like many of you, thought that we had dealt with the last outage,” he said. Unfortunately, upon further reflection, we see that we’ve learned very little from this incident. Our ability to learn from our mistakes—our ability to adapt—is clearly paramount to the firm’s success.

“Over the years, we’ve drifted toward a culture of blame, detrimental to our ability to learn. To be quite blunt, if anyone made a mistake or was part of an accident, we blamed them for it. We reprimanded, demoted, or worse, discarded people. Sadly, this approach has not made our systems more resilient to failures—quite the contrary, as evidenced by the recent outages, which were unprecedented in both ...