Blame culture is prevalent in many growing organizations and can lead to counterproductive outcomes. A developer introduces a bug, a product manager incorrectly describes a feature, or the marketer sends the wrong message.
In my experience, the organization always looks for a person to blame, and in extreme cases they get fired. But it’s almost always counter-productive to the company. For every mistake a person makes, there are tons of good work they do that goes unnoticed.
We are eventually all going to be replaced by robots. So let’s use an impersonal scenario where each person is replaced by an application.
Imagine an issue arises where an email has been sent to customers, and instead of a link to check the new service, an incorrect link is sent. To make matters worse, let’s say the link points to the competitor's service instead. To develop this feature, the research team surveyed customers. The VPs drafted a product spec, the product managers created a flow, the designers designed it, and the developers built it.
Somehow, the email was already sent to customers when the mistake was caught. It’s an embarrassment to the company. The company becomes a target of ridicule on reddit, for copying their competitor's homework and then linking to it. This makes the executive team extra mad.
When people are responsible for each task, we look for who messed up and fire them. Not just for the mistake, but for the embarrassment.
On the other hand, if robots perform, the blame will fall on the process. We will look at each point of the process and investigate what information was communicated incorrectly to cause the issue. We would add additional steps to verify the process and test for errors. If the issue was introduced between product managers and developers, we will look for ways to improve the communication. For example, we will add some tests between the two robots to make sure they each understand the request from the other.
It should be no different for people. When a mistake is made, the best thing to do is to review the process. Then find ways to improve communication between the two parties involved.
Ultimately, improving the process is key — don't hate the player; hate the game.