When is taking accountability bad for business?

“I know it’s my fault. I had a lot on my mind, but I should have caught it...” said one of the most capable and chaos-reducing professionals I know. 

Then she launched into a story that sounded more like a three-ring circus than a work environment.

No one can be perfect when every day is a fire drill. If you want precision, you need consistency. You need systems that make it harder to mess up than to do it right.

My friend was working in an environment that she once described as “5 cats fighting in a bag.”

Here’s what actually happened:

• Her boss failed to document a change, despite three reminders.

• The dashboard that gave them the numbers for the calculation had been broken for a year.

• Two people did a manual calculation and got different results because no one ever wrote down the formula. 

• There was no process for verifying whose answer was correct.

• The system didn’t automate the process or the math, so it had to be set up from scratch every time.

• The person responsible for reviewing the final draft was unavailable.

• And my friend, who was the caboose of this crazy train, had guests in town. 

She couldn’t control the mayhem upstream, but somehow she was the one apologizing. 

“Have you ever heard of a ‘blameless post-mortem’?” I asked.

It’s a concept that I learned from software companies. When a bug causes a major incident, the review isn’t about a bad line of code but the whole causal chain.

❓What wasn’t documented?

❓How did the QA team miss it?

❓Why didn’t the monitoring tools catch it?

❓What assumptions weren’t checked?

❓What redundancies didn’t exist?

❓How could we have responded faster?

That same approach works in PeopleOps. Messing up can't-miss processes like sensitive information handling or someone’s final paycheck is rarely a single mistake, but a series of missed handoffs. 

If the process can’t tolerate a single participant having an off day, it isn’t a people problem. It’s a system design failure.

The fix doesn’t come from getting better at apologies. Everyone needs to get in a room with enough psychological safety to stop pointing fingers and start solving problems.

Do mistakes keep happening and you feel like the one left holding the bag?

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