We watch a lot of sports at our house. By “we,” I mean Craig is a big sports fan and I occasionally look up from my book and ask questions that make him sigh. As we watched the last seconds of a college basketball game, I asked him, “Will that player be okay even though he lost them the game?” (I worry about the young players’ emotional wellbeing. I can’t help it.)
Craig answered, “He didn’t lose them the game. Every play matters. Every player matters. The result is based on the whole game, not the last shot.”
That’s the heart of systems thinking: Everything, seen and unseen, brings us and our organization to this moment and every member of the system has contributed to our current reality.
That’s why we at TLJ often remind ourselves and our clients, “There is no blame.”
Notice your reaction to that statement, the activation of your nervous system, the protest forming in your mind . . . and try this on:
When faced with the complexity of real life, our minds look for shortcuts.
It’s lazy, really. It takes a lot of effort to get ourselves up to a high balcony to see how things really happened over time and so we default to linear shortcuts. One of our favorite shortcuts? “Whose fault is this?”
It makes sense, in a way. If we can just figure out who is to blame for our problem, then we can fix or get rid of them and we won’t have a problem anymore.
And if that would work, it would have worked by now.
And blame is still blame, even when we’re nice about it and use soft words and vague sentences to send the message, “This is your fault. You have to pay.”
I can hear the gears grinding . . . am I saying that there is no accountability? No, because blame and accountability are not the same thing. Unfortunately, we tend to use the terms interchangeably. “Who needs to be held accountable?” often means, “Who needs to be punished?”
But blame is easy and accountability is hard.
Blame means narrowing down fault, usually to one person or group. Accountability means looking at how many factors (including all of us) contributed over time.
Blame asks, “Who do we need to punish, fix or get rid of?” Accountability asks, “How can we do this better next time?”
Blame creates fear and scapegoating. Accountability creates agreements that guide us and help us to understand what our responsibilities are.
Blame leads to punishment. Accountability leads to, well, accountability – the practice of owning our own mistakes and breakdowns and taking responsibility for them (including the consequences) while also letting others experience the consequences of their own mistakes and breakdowns.
So, no, that basketball player didn’t lose his team the game. And I’m sure he also felt terrible about it. Charlie Brown observed from the pitcher’s mound that every pitcher will end up as the hero or the goat and it is no fun to be the goat.
But a good coach will take the whole team through the whole tape of the whole game in the context of the whole season with an eye on the capabilities of each player and a rigorous commitment to improvement for everyone, including himself.
That’s what it looks like when there is no blame.
