Who is to blame?
Today I joined many London based workers in working from home. Using the bike would make me too vulnerable and public transport meant changing trains at Clapham, one of yesterday’s scenes of violence. Like many others I had a 24 hour news channel going in the background. For the past 24 hours the usual media blame game had been diluted by the shock and outrage of the last few days events. By this morning the media were obliged to start their analyses. After all, they have to keep the story going and keep those all important viewer ratings up. If I were a cynic I might even believe that they were relieved that they had something new – after all we are all bored with News International and nobody is tuning in to hear what’s going on in Norway anymore.
Then suddenly it started. Almost immediately after an interview with a senior police officer a new headline flashed up. Police chief admits blah blah blah. In reality the police chief had conceded [blah blah blah] as a problem after being harangued by the interviewer. But what a wonderfully emotive word admits is! Where there is an admission there must be blame. We all know that admission is really an abbreviation for admission of guilt.
Just a minute – how did you get on to criticism of the mass media in a blog that has an agile tag? Actually I didn’t. I spent my day writing an article on metrics and measurement, which naturally also entered the realms of system thinking. Many agile coaches love to tell people that they measure the wrong things and drive the wrong behaviour by the things they measure. Not all are as good when it comes to advising what should be measured and how to use the data obtained. One thing that we do agree on is that many of the measures traditionally used in software development are focused on knowing who to blame when it all goes wrong. Even worse when those measurements exist solely to ensure that someone else gets the blame (and not me, or my organisation).
During the course of the day we identified a whole host of culprits and triggers, including the poor old PM who picked the wrong time to go on holiday. That prompted a series of questions. Is the poor project manager / PMO manager / IT director / CFO really a bad person because he wants to know who to blame? Or is that just the way that he has been conditioned by society? Are the media stirring it up by trying to find scapegoats, or are they just exploiting an innate human desire to blame somebody (else) when things go wrong? Of course I could be barking up the wrong tree. Lets face it, real analysis, research, identification of root causes and systemic failures are hardly sensational and unlikely to increase ratings without somebody to pin the blame on. Perhaps I’m trying to assume too much about human nature by what I see on the television. After all, social commentary is the domain of the artist and not the news anchor.
Interestingly no time was devoted to talking about root causes or systemic failures. The social media have taken their share of the blame, most notably Twitter and BBM (Blackberry Messenger). While we are looking for people to blame it doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone that the sensationalism of the mainstream media may be just as responsible. Certainly nobody has asked the question. I’m not suggesting censorship or media blackouts, but I can’t escape the question: would it have spread so far and fast without being fuelled by the mass media? Of course my data is skewed because it is derived from a single source which has a vested interest in ensuring that the blame is attributed to somebody else. I have no doubt that our business leaders would not be foolish enough to make decisions, or place blame, based on data which is biased, skewed or simply manipulated.
