Comment by shkkmo
5 months ago
I think you are conflating accountability and blame when I don't think those terms can be used interchangeably here. Accountability can be used as a way of assigning blame, but that isn't all that it is good for.
Accountability, at least as presented here, is about feeeback between those affected by a decision and those making it. In a "blameless culture", people are still held to account for their decisions and actions but are not blamed for their results.
I would argue that a blameless culture actually makes accountability sinks less likely to develop. In blameful cultures, avoiding accountability avoids blame, but that is not needed in a blameless culture.
Thanks, I found your response really helpful, and it helped identify some of the mistakes in my thinking. "In blameful cultures, avoiding accountability avoids blame, but that is not needed in a blameless culture." - that really made a lot of sense to me.
That wasn't a thought I had articulated before I read your comment, so your comment was also very productive for me.
A blameless postmortem culture says that when a human error is identified in the causal chain leading to an incident, there will be no consequences for the individual. In a sense it embraces blame but eschews accountability.
> In a sense it embraces blame but eschews accountability.
The two concepts we are talking about are each talked about under each label so there is enough ambiguity in both words that this is true. However choosing to use 'blame' in the opposite sense from the one being used in that context adds nothing to the conversation.