Comment by lostcolony
5 years ago
Maybe. I've seen the opposite, where no one takes responsibility for anything, and it's also bad. In fact, the situation you describe could also be a lack of anyone else taking responsibility for disaster planning and etc.
I think what is needed is a culture of -ownership-. That's basically people saying "I'm responsible". Not one where everyone tries to avoid responsibility, and not one where peopel point fingers.
Why does someone need to take responsibility when you can have a culture of blameless postmortems where everyone focuses on making sure what ever happened never happens again instead? In blameless postmortem culture, everyone is responsible by default
"Everyone focuses" = nothing gets done. I've been at places like that, where a post-mortem happens, a course of action is decided on...and then no one owns actually carrying out that course of action.
You could argue that "It should be assigned" - yeah, it should. But assigning it implies either "here is the team that is responsible for it", i.e., this is the team responsible and they need to be told to fix their shit (which very much sounds like blame), OR it implies "here is the team that I am entrusting to fix it DESPITE their obviously not being responsible for it", which is just as bad, since it implies that the team that 'is' responsible for it is incompetent.
The only healthy option is that the 'responsible' team stands up to say "hey, that's ours; we'll fix it", and the only way they'll do that is if you have a culture of safety and ownership.
Also, one thing to make clear - ownership = responsible = blame. They're all words for the same thing, just different implications. You can't have someone 'own' something without making them responsible, and apt to be blamed if you don't ensure the culture is one that does not attach blame. That's really what I was getting at; of course you shouldn't blame. But, you can't also avoid ownership. But ownership implies you know WHO to blame, and so blame comes very easily. And it's very easy to mistake pointing out responsibility/ownership for something as blame; I have had multiple managers tell me "it's not us vs them" when I've raised up the fact that I'm unable to deliver to deadlines because I have been unable to get anything from product.
But ownership of a fix is not blame for an incident. Those aren't the same.
You don't say "this incident was your teams fault". You say "your team is responsible for ensuring that this incident can't happen again".
The people most capable of taking the action items are assigned it. This could be expertise, resourcing, proximity, etc..
In an open discussion of the root cause, many times the issue is across multiple services / organizations within a company. You’d assign tasks appropriately across teams as needed. The key is to find and create actionables to address the root cause, not to punish / blame individuals.
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The blameless postmortem an "legal fiction" that don't really mean that blame cannot be assigned just that blame cannot result in punishment or loss of face/standing.
At the end of they day you are going to have someone stand up and say: yep we should have planned for this, and we will correct this in x, y, z, ways.
What does it mean to be responsible? Just to say it? Responsibility should be accompanied with fines corresponding to the damage or something like it. Otherwise those are just words. I'm responsible, but I'm not getting any fines if something goes wrong, so whatever, but I'm responsible. Fire me if you want, I'll find new work in a few days, but I was responsible.
It's business owner who's responsible, because ultimately he's getting all the expenses when critical event happens, client leaves, client sues the company, and so on. Other people are not really responsible, they just pretend to be.
So I've actually written about this in the past, but, responsibility is -actually effecting the entity-.
That is, "you're responsible for this" - if they do it, and it succeeds, what happens? If they don't do it, and it fails, what happens? If the answer is "nothing" in either of those cases, they're not actually responsible. If the result is too detached, they're also not actually responsible (i.e., if I decide not to do one of the ten tasks assigned to me, and I don't hear about it until review time, if at all, then I was never responsible).
Responsibility is innately tied with knowledge and empowerment, but without going on at length, and to just give an example - if I'm the one woken up by the pagerduty alarm when something breaks, I am responsible for that something, because its success or failure directly affects me. If, however, there is a separate ops team that has to deal with it, and I can slumber peacefully, responsibility has been diluted; you won't get as good a result.
Just speaking for me, but if my employer would start issuing fines... lets just say i would starting to run...