Blame culture isn’t what I used to think it is
I used to think that you’d notice blame culture by seeing people punished for mistakes. And, that a culture of blame is wrong because no individual is ever solely responsible for a mistake because we all work within complex systems.
Now I realise that a culture of blame is much more subtle.
Blame culture exists when people feel like they have to explain their actions, and always their failings, as caused by something outside of themselves. This thing happened because that person didn’t do something, they say. Or some other thing didn’t happen because that’s just how it is around here. None of this was caused by my actions, they suggest. That is a culture of blame.
The opposite of a culture of blame isn’t a culture of accepting mistakes, it’s a culture of accepting responsibility. You can see the absence of a culture of blame in the sense of agency people have. When people show initiative and take risks, when they approach problems with ways they can contribute to solving them, when they take control of things within their influence, that’s when there is no culture of blame.