Recently, I discussed a difficult situation with someone; it’s a situation that, sooner or later, represents us all. What happens when something goes wrong, but it’s nobody’s fault?
Especially nowadays, when everything we are trying to do is difficult, not only because we are working from home (which can be more difficult… consider only that instead of poking your head into someone’s office and asking a question or literally walking five steps to someone’s desk, you now have to potentially compete with however many other people who are trying to get their attention via phone, email or whatever online face-to-face you are using… and that’s without any further potential issues, such as internet disruptions, unexpected domestic issues and the one neighbour that never seems to give it a break deciding to play loud music again), but also because of the broken supply chains and disrupted production lines, things can and do go wrong.
And when they do, something tends to happen that shouldn’t really be happening.
We try to find the blame.
The constructive approach would be to try to
1. bring the situation under control, so that the damage of any kind is minimised,
2. figure out what exactly happened,
3. take further steps that are necessary to both learn from the situation and avoid things going wrong next time.
Very, very rarely do things go wrong because someone deliberately sabotaged them, or because they were lazy and irresponsible. Most of the time, things go wrong because sometimes, they do. A missed email in a ton of others, a misunderstanding with someone, even bad linguistic capabilities somewhere along the way can all be responsible for things going wrong. Among the weirdest (and in that case most tragic) cases I have ever seen myself was a brain tumour; a person who had been the epitome of kind, helpful, energetic, efficient and reliable became, not quite overnight but in a very short time, odd to say the least. Things got done wrong, they got filed away wrong, they weren’t done, the person was suddenly nasty and unresponsive.
Not much later, they were gone – fallen victim to a sudden, very fast growing, large brain tumour.
They’d done an amazing about of damage where work was concerned, and to this day, I ask myself why, when things first started to go wrong, nobody realised that this was odd and tried to take steps about it. It would be highly unlikely that their life could have been saved, not at the rate the tumour was progressing, but at the very least, they would not have spent their last weeks irritated and confused, and the fall-out would have been easier to manage.
But not a single bit of the resulting mess could be honestly blamed on this perfectly inoffensive, non-smoking teetotaller family person who was enthusiastic about every day of their work and, at least while I knew them, never seemed to be grumpy or lacked empathy (and was, in fact, known to actively make time even when they didn’t have to for people who needed them to).
While this is an extreme case, it is a very sombre reminder of the fact that our health, our personal, business and social circumstances, our environment and those of others we work with are never fully in our own control. Chance can and does play a large role in everyday life, and this does include business.
Instead of getting used to it, however, and responding with the above three step solution, human beings tend to prefer the following
1. Blame game
2. Maladaptive change management
3. Repetition
Blame game doesn’t need to involve people trying to blame each other (although that can happen, and, as it gets more and more stressed and ad hominem, it starts to reflect biases too, which makes it even uglier). The largest part of the blame game in any office is the inability to simply look at the situation, fix it and try to learn from it in lieu of trying to find out who is at fault. This isn’t just bad because it detracts from those three business-saving steps, but because it places a completely wrong focus on what you are in fact supposed to try to achieve once something goes wrong.
Especially where actual lives could be at stake, prevention should be your mantra. But part of prevention is not merely thinking up scenarios that could go wrong, and knowing your craft inside out (eg chemistry and engineering). It is also learning from mistakes of those who have failed before us, in similar situations, and, rather than placing blame, recognising patterns of what went wrong so this time, it goes right.
We all make mistakes. 99.9 percent of the time, they do not happen on purpose. So stop trying to effectively punish mistakes – and therefore each other -, but use them as a learning curve instead.
Maladaptive change management is the change we take up that serves no real purpose. We’ve all seen it, and chances are we’ve all had at least one experience where, instead of doing something to stop it, we or someone we know did what is generally done with maladaptive change… we kept doing whatever it was more in some feeble, fallacy based hope that this time, it would work. A brilliant example of how this works starts when we are children; amazing amount of energy has always been expended to find the “right” (aka rigid) type of learning, and we keep doing so despite the fact that we now know beyond doubt that different people pick things up differently. The feeling that someone just isn’t doing things enough vs the approach needs to be changed continues, as a learned pattern, into adulthood, where it features in our daily work in many shapes and sizes. I have myself noticed that, since the start of the pandemic, the maladaptive change has been on the rise, presumably because people are trying to desperately cope with a situation that is almost fully outside their control, but aren’t coming to terms with the fact that sometimes, things that look like solutions really aren’t. This is a topic I have visited with many of my clients and is likely to remain relevant even after the pandemic, because it is highly unlikely that we will abandon all the things we have now incorporated into our work and life, even if they aren’t serving a purpose, because they will have become a habit at a heightened rate from the changes that would happen without the stressors in the background.
Repetition is all about the things that keep going wrong again and again; this happens not because people aren’t paying attention or aren’t applying themselves, but because when people learn patterns, they tend to repeat patterns. And this leads into a nasty vicious circle that becomes difficult to break… unless we start to actively think about what we are actually doing. First step – remove the stressors. In this case, the anxiously awaited blame game. Second step – honestly discuss the procedures. That’s usually where the maladaptive change is hiding. Step three is adopt the initial three steps rather than the maladaptive ones.
The key to this kind of change management is the recognition that sometimes, things just happen. In the case I mentioned at the start, the combination of supply chain and production issues (courtesy of covid), coupled with understandable overworking of everyone involved, led to a bad delay. The negative – and sadly often usual – response to this would be to spend a lot of valuable time dithering about the information, getting involved in more time wasting blame game and changing nothing.
The positive response would be the recognition that things are, especially currently, going wrong, salvaging what can be salvaged and attempting to somewhat lessen the workload of people who are most likely to be able to actively work towards preventing this from happening again, provided they aren’t buried under a ton of additional work, especially if the work in question got landed on them because of bad work division habits in the company (a topic, I think, for another day, but definitely one to address).
Learning to not only not treat every situation as a disaster that will end the world, but also that there are situations where no one is at fault is difficult, because it is still somewhat socially taboo; but it is perhaps the single most important thing that you need to learn especially as a C-suite member. When you are the person that delegates, but also takes over when things go wrong, you have the responsibility to yourself and your team to be open, honest and unbiased, and these start by recognising that sometimes, things are outside of our control, but that doesn’t mean that they cannot be salvaged and learned from. This way, you can not only be fair and constructive – you will also learn to take the pressure of yourself, and will therefore be more capable of acting according to what is constructively needed…not what is socially expected.