It is so easy

byfalphenaar

753 followers

8 years ago

Indeed, it is so easy to blame someone.

You know how it is, something goes wrong and there is always someone to blame. In some cases it is the name and shame game, sometimes it is less hectic in the sense that it is not you who is to blame but someone else and you are happy that is was not you.

I once worked for a company with trillions of Euros going through their systems and obvious when something goes wrong sh*t hits the fan, losing €50,000,000 in seconds because a script supposed to run in a test environment was running in production. Oops, luckily it was not me, no-one could blame me.

I do not know if in this case the “guilty” once was fired or if his or her contract was ended but it is human nature to find the easy option and that is finger-pointing because we need to find the guilty one.

Pretty sure that you can remember or think of situations were you were finger-pointed at or you were finger-pointing at someone so everyone knows who did it. That is never a fine situation, maybe you were wrong, maybe someone else was wrong, so what, can we crack on please?

I remember back in 2000, and I just started as an IT project manager, a vice president of the Internet Provider I worked, for once said and I never forget that.

Never Finger-point at Someone, Three Fingers are Pointing at Yourself.

I use that a lot within my Project Management work. I make mistakes, team members make mistakes, sometimes with interesting results, sometimes devastating results which I have to solve somehow as a project manager and communicate to management.

If something goes wrong then the first thing is to find the solution to solve the problem so we can, as mentioned before, crack on, there is a deadline waiting.

Arguing, the finger-pointing, whose fault it was is useless unless you use the outcome of that argument as a lessons learned but who is reading lessons learned anyway?