I recently woke up one morning and, bleary eyed, grabbed a cold bottle of iced tea from the fridge. It’s my small allowance of caffeine intake for the day and I was glad for the foresight to pop it in the night before to chill. That’s one of those handy misconceptions we tend to use, thinking of refrigerators as “adding cold” to food, when the reality is a system of expanding and contracting gases that displaces heat within (with much more nuance than my lowercase engineering education has to offer).
And then it clicked for me, said caffeine hitting my bloodstream. Creating an environment to absorb and maintain conditions, to handle unexpected rises and falls within it: That’s how you create the opportunity for an organization to be blameless. Leadership often approaches it from the wrong angle, the misunderstanding of how to go about changing the mindsets of individuals. You’re not looking to put blamelessness into your teams, and more notably the individuals making up those teams. You’re looking to develop an environment in which blame can be absorbed and redirected.
Why is that? Well, much like food, we can come into situations warm, so to speak. Telling folks to “just” chill out, to be blameless without being able to redirect those feelings elsewhere does little to help. Typically when that happens, you just disperse a lot of those feelings towards other folks and spoil everyone’s day. Structure and guidelines are instead needed to figure out how we stay frosty.
They also have to be continuously working. I’ve known folks who are strong proponents of blamelessness in their retrospective meetings, even during their incidents – only to snipe one another in architectural discussions and backroom clandestine meetings. Sure, it takes more energy to be proactive about understanding where and when folks feel like lashing out. The reverse, where a few folks refuse that mindset, equally ruins it for everyone. Blamelessness has to be universal.
“All models are wrong, but some can be useful.”
We say “I’m going to chill this in the fridge for a while” with the expectation (if incorrect) that it is “putting cold into it” because that abstraction is simpler to reason about. It’s shorthand and easier to express than “I’m going to place this milk in a box that will absorb the heat from it and dissipate it such that the internal temperature of it will stay at a level that maintains it able to be safely consumed.” A mouthful, in a few ways. Jargon is powerful and useful, which is to say developing systems require more precise language than when casually acknowledging how they’re implemented.
Avoiding further risk of straining a metaphor to breaking, it’s then the challenge of us to develop understanding of our bands of communications – continually checking in with folks, understanding concerns and developing strategies to cope with stress – that allows us to make this work. We don’t necessarily see what makes this work day in and day out, but we definitely notice it when it’s not working.
But don’t ask me about how the vegetable drawer works. That still mystifies me.