Be Careful With The Blameless Culture

Blameless culture sounds great on paper - who wouldn’t want a workplace where mistakes are learning opportunities rather than witch hunts? But here’s the catch: this noble idea can easily backfire.

Blamelessness, left unchecked, tends to drift towards the culture of avoidance. Where “lack of blaming” is a convenient excuse for lack of accountability and avoidance of tough conversations.

Just not blaming is not enough.

A proper blameless culture is very hard to implement, as it’s not only about not blaming others - that’s an easy part. What you do instead is what counts the most.

I’ve seen too many companies where what they considered a “blameless culture” resulted in the deterioration of their product’s quality and culture.

Low-quality code is being pushed to the repository. Bugs piling up. Performance is degrading over time. Failing release pipelines. The incident management team is constantly overwhelmed by alerts.

Even though everyone sees the problems, they are not being fixed properly. Whistleblowers raising those are being brushed off as “not to play the blame game”. Issues may be roughly patched, but then recur again.

The blamelessness is twisted here. From a noble idea to a mere excuse used to avoid difficult conversations. Instead of fostering openness and growth, it becomes the perfect excuse to sweep problems under the rug and avoid tough conversations altogether. As a result, there is no accountability. Lack of accountability is one of the most dangerous dysfunctions in the team.

Accountability is the key

Difficult topics are being pushed aside, buried under the pile of other priorities. People get used to the lack of quality, standards are being loosened up, the broken windows theory kicks in, and issues proliferate. After all, if others are not paying attention to their bugs, why should I? Especially when deadlines are pushing.

At the same time, people in the teams get frustrated. They see the quality declining. They struggle with incidents and technical debt. With bugs. They raise the issues but are dismissed as “blaming others”. So they start complaining in secret. Seeing another broken build, another bug, they put the blame on people who, in their opinion, are not doing a good job.

Broken blameless culture leads to more blaming!

Surely not the result we were hoping for.

How not to blame

Does it mean that it’s time to ditch the idea of blamelessness and start pointing fingers at wrongdoers? Certainly not!

Putting blame on particular people for systemic issues affecting your org will get you nowhere. Publicly scolding the person who was unlucky enough to be the last one to trigger a production incident might be tempting, but it is a terrible way to handle the problem. Culture will quickly become toxic, and people will make sure to avoid any possible risk, further pushing the system down the slippery slope.

The only valid way to handle problems in a blameless way is to start with a single yet very important question.

Why?

Why why? Because you want to get to the bottom of things. Understand why bad things are happening. Why is it possible to push bad code to the repo? Why are bugs not being solved? Why is it easy to bring down the production?

Keep asking those questions. Don’t focus on particular people. Focus on the root cause. Dig to the bottom of the problem and then propose a solution that will eliminate the issue. If the new intern can bring the production down, the problem is not the intern. The problem is the lack of safeguards in the process.

Blameless discipline

A proper blameless culture requires a relentless pursuit of issues and a disciplined analysis of their root causes. Detached from particular people’s “blame”, but by that, even more, focused on constant challenging of the status quo and not accepting easy solutions.

A strong culture cannot allow for problems to be ignored. It requires people to feel confident enough to say, “Stop! This is wrong, and we should not continue like this,” and then proceed with a blameless yet relentless systemic analysis of how to eliminate the issue. Being able to do that requires an organisation that does not shy away from difficult discussions. An organisation where people feel safe to raise their concerns and are taken seriously, not brushed off as “problematic ones”.

Embrace the blameless culture, but do it right. It has to be built on a solid foundation of discipline, accountability and relentless pursuit of constant improvement. Don’t blame particular people, but instead focus on systemic changes that will prevent similar problems in the future. Then and only then, you will be able to proudly say, “We have a blameless culture here”.