Assigning versus Accepting Responsibility

Sometimes the serendipitous juxtaposition of two Tweets can lead to fruitful pondering.

This morning, I found Andy Oram's Washington Post article, WikiLeaks cable dump reveals flaws of State Department's information-sharing tool right above The GodLight's Tweet, "Don't be so hard on yourself, everyone makes mistakes. Let go of your frustration & make use of what you are good at."

Oram's article has the blame game flavor that is coming to permeate interpersonal transactions, particularly by those in the high-power mainstream.  The media makes its living via the blame game.  Readers have become apathetic to ubiquitous gloom and doom reporting, but they have not taken this so far as to empathize with the people on the other side of the story.  Most of the people being reported on are just like the readers -- people who are trying to do their best, make a living, have a family and relax a bit. 

Oram reports on the shortfalls of the State Department's Net-Centric Diplomacy database that arose because of an evolutionary shift in its use and purpose.  He points out contributing user error.  This is not surprising to those of us who work in sociotechnical system development.  David Woods and Klaus Christoffersen wrote about this problem over a decade ago when describing the envisioned world problem in the article Balancing Practice-Centered Ressearch and Design.  They write --


"Fields of practice are not static; rather demands, pressures and resources are changing. New possibilities are envisioned and advocates push their particular vision, but the introduction of new systems transforms the nature of practice in the form of new roles, new judgments, new forms of coordination, and new paths toward and forms of breakdown."

In essence the tool necessarily changes the nature of the work which then requires a different tool or modifications to the existing tool which then change the nature of the work...and so on.  Because of the way programs are funded by the federal government, continuous vigilance for envisioned world impacts is not part of the government's acquisition culture.  Weaknesses, brittleness are therefore to be expected.

It would be easy to blame someone in the government for this shortsightedness.  Assign responsibility and can the person responsible.  That is the blame game response.

But the blame game leads to silence, to hiding issues, to spinning, to applying lip gloss on a sow, and to litigation.  None of these serve to resolve the root cause of the problem.  Let's admit it, a lot of our desire for privacy is to prevent people from being able to point fingers.  We want a little screen to hide behind.

That's why I like TheGodLight's Tweet, "Don't be so hard on yourself, everyone makes mistakes. Let go of your frustration & make use of what you are good at."  This approach leads to openness that allows can-do spirits to address and retire problems rather than pushing them to someone else's desk, to another generation, or as my mother sometimes used to hope, the problems "will rot and disappear."

Some people in health care delivery are beginning to take up a like theme.  Don't be so cover-your-ass centric; when something goes wrong, admit it.  Apologize.  (There's a concept that has faded since kindergarten.)  Do your best to make things right.  This approach is put forward as a potential mitigation for malpractice suits.  Sometimes just admitting you're not perfect, that you've done the best you can at what you're good at is enough to engage empathy and understanding.  Doctors don't set out to make mistakes any more than the developers and managers of Net-Centric Diplomacy wanted vulnerabilities that lead to compromise.

Ultimately, we have to decide if we want to be people who accept the responsibility that goes hand-in-hand with being thinking, acting beings, or whether we want to assign responsibility and punish good people. 

The latter is what American elections have come to represent.  Many of us don't want to accept the responsibility of understanding issues, transcending the media blame game and dirt dishing, and look for candidates who share our vision and have the ideas and skills to help make it happen.  We would rather blame the bums in power and fire their butts.  This is easier, and it is a mistake.  Can we accept that responsibility, put the fear and frustration it imbues behind us and chose another way?