Monday, 28 January 2008
Saturday, 15 September 2007
Tuesday, 10 July 2007
Life Skills: Blame Avoidance
Searched the internet for a course on this but there is nothing obvious on how to become an expert in the essential life skill of avoiding blame. So trying here to develop and collect expertise in this. This will be very useful in cultures which have a stated no blame culture, as these cultures normally develop when personal organisational progress depends on being able to creatively shift blame to other people. The guiding principle of career progression in these cultures is "Errors have been made, others will be blamed."
How to do this without becoming a scumbag though?
Well the first way I suggest is always to blame somebody who is not at work. So if Jeff isn't in today, then we can easily maintain that it is his fault that something's gone wrong. When Jeff is back in work, but Jonah isn't, then we can revise our judgment and assign the blame to Jonah. For many issues this can be carried on for some time, meeting the basic human need to have somebody to blame, without that person suffering to any degree or having to spend much time on what they're being blamed for.
This technique is most easily applied when management ensure that there is a high turnover of staff in the organisation or department. Then almost all bad things* can be blamed on somebody who has now left. If there is nobody suitable then continue an in depth investigation into the bad thing until somebody does leave then rapidly conclude that the leaver was to blame. This technique can maintain organisational morale indefinitely, as long as you keep staff turnover high.
*You may have your own organisational language for bad things, which is used to clarify the various shades of badness of things, such as: "adverse incident", "serious untoward incident", "near miss", "critical incident" etc
How to do this without becoming a scumbag though?
Well the first way I suggest is always to blame somebody who is not at work. So if Jeff isn't in today, then we can easily maintain that it is his fault that something's gone wrong. When Jeff is back in work, but Jonah isn't, then we can revise our judgment and assign the blame to Jonah. For many issues this can be carried on for some time, meeting the basic human need to have somebody to blame, without that person suffering to any degree or having to spend much time on what they're being blamed for.
This technique is most easily applied when management ensure that there is a high turnover of staff in the organisation or department. Then almost all bad things* can be blamed on somebody who has now left. If there is nobody suitable then continue an in depth investigation into the bad thing until somebody does leave then rapidly conclude that the leaver was to blame. This technique can maintain organisational morale indefinitely, as long as you keep staff turnover high.
*You may have your own organisational language for bad things, which is used to clarify the various shades of badness of things, such as: "adverse incident", "serious untoward incident", "near miss", "critical incident" etc
Friday, 1 June 2007
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