The Blame Game

As a culture, we like the play the "What-if" game. What if a different actor had been in the movie? What if I hadn't gone to Japan? What if I hadn't met Amanda? (The last one is a particularly horrible thought!)

In fact, we're encouraged to think this way -- to look back at the decisions we've made and how they contributed to our current situation. For instance, when I worked at a mill a few years ago, I was hit by a tier of lumber at the stacker. The operator hadn't been paying attention, and forwarded the next tier before I finished pulling the poorly-graded boards away from the previous one. It's pretty clear that the stacker operator was at fault, but when we did an accident investigation, we had to look at the root cause. I was on the wrong side of the boards.

I didn't cause the accident, and the other person involved was certainly to blame. But I had made what I'd normally call a low-percentage move -- something that may work, but has a low percentage of happening without other consequences (see balancing a milk jug on a cereal box).

Traffic accident investigations and post-action reports work the same way too. They focus on finding all things that may have led to the final result. Were you past the stop line? You may have contributed. Were you texting with your cell phone? Your distraction may have helped cause the accident. I realize these examples are concrete evidence rather than matters of opinion, but they help show that as a society, we're obsessed with looking for anything that might have helped to cause an event.

We need to get away from victim blaming. This is true. But at the same time, I think that people need to realize that our culture surrounds us with these few questions: "What if?" and "How could it have been avoided?" So if we screw up and ask these questions at precisely the wrong time, please cut us a little slack before denouncing us as horrible people, okay? Believe it or not, most of us are actively trying *not* to be.