Employing Differences, Episode 22: Whose fault is it?

Karen: 0:08

Welcome to Employing Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals.

Paul: 0:15

I'm Paul T evis.

Karen: 0:16

And I'm Karen Gimnig

Paul: 0:18

Each episode, we start with a question and we see where it takes us. This week's question is"Whose fault is it?" Well, it's clearly not mine.

Karen: 0:31

I think that's exactly where we go with this question.I think we ask the question because we're looking at a problem and if it's not a relationship problem– if it's just like the dishwasher doesn't work– we go looking for the source. We go looking for the loose wire. And then we apply that to the relational space and go,"Okay, something's not working, where's the broken wire?" But we've got enough sort of internal resistance that the broken wire(a) has to be a person and(b) has to be not me.

Paul: 1:06

Right? Yeah. It's weird how often the problem is in someone else rather than ourselves. I think that the tendency to want to solve problems is really strong. And it's actually a really good thing. We want to figure out where did things go wrong so that we can make them better next time. We actually want to address them, and I think that's where our impulse to figure out causes comes from. What's challenging, I think is that assumes there is a cause– that there is one thing that is at fault, that if we just address that one thing, it will be better next time it will go away, that was the one thing that caused it. And that's not how it works. Even outside of relationships, in a lot of the work that I do, we're working in complex systems where the failures happen in what's sometimes been called"Swiss cheese failures" where all of these combinations of things lined up in such a way that the hole through all the slices of cheese was there. And so there is no fault. There's no one piece of cheese whose fault it was in that situation. That's true not just in relationships, that's true in other parts of the world as well. And rarely do problems in relationships and blow ups and things like that have a single cause, have a single fault. And so assigning fault(1) doesn't work because there isn't one and(2) can actually be counterproductive to solving the problem.

Karen: 2:54

Yup. And all of what you just said applies also to the second favorite way to answer the whose fault is it, which is I'm going to own my responsibility. I have learned and do enough personal growth to know that I shouldn't just blame you. So I'm going to show up and say how it's my fault.

Paul: 3:14

That it's all your fault.

Karen: 3:17

It's all my fault. Or at least I'm owning– or maybe I'm owning my piece and expecting you're going to own your piece, cause it's our two faults– and everything that you just said still doesn't work. It still is that fundamental problem of finding the source of the problem in relationships isn't the same as finding the solution. What we're pointing to here is that if you're looking for whose fault it is, you may sort of build up your ego, in some ways you may make some points in some kind of corporate cultures that we'd rather you weren't in, but maybe you are– that happens. But what we think is not likely to happen if you're chasing the"whose fault is it?" question is that you'll build stronger connections or better working relationships.

Paul: 4:04

One of my favorite terms for least favorite activities is,"blamestorming." I've seen any number of organizations and teams engage in it, which is we're going to spend a lot of time and energy establishing whose fault it is or where this thing came from. And you're right, that isn't productive for the reasons we've just talked about. And also it absolves us of any responsibility to do anything to change, to change anything about it. It doesn't do any good for us to fully assign responsibility to somebody else, It doesn't do us any good for us to assign full responsibility to ourselves, because the reality is there's a lot of different things that are at play. Unless we're willing to dig into the complexity of it and dig into the messiness of it, it's not going to change. So I often come to the place of,"Whose fault is it? It doesn't matter." What matters is it's here now, it's happening now. What do we want to do about it?

Karen: 5:12

And not only is it happening, but feelings about it are happening. And ultimately I think that's the better question is"What's going on emotionally in this space around this and where do we have capacity to connect in those emotions?" If it's my day to be triggered, I'm going to be off the rails, and then you are the one who can show up with the resilience to sort of listen to my not-great language, take some of that in and reach that connectional space back to me and say,"We can still have a space of belonging here. We can still have a safe place where we can." And then on another day when you're the one who's triggered, it's hard for you to have that capacity. And then I can show up with that. Or maybe a third party on the team is the one who's showing up with that. But the question isn't about who has the skill it's about where do we find the capacity for working through the emotional spaces today?

Paul: 6:17

When I have worked with teams in the past, one of the things that I look for a lot is: To what degree does the team own problems that individuals might surface. That may be, we're working together on something and I'm having a problem on my computer and I'm not able to get through this thing. And if the team treats that as my problem that I need to go fix, that tells me something. And if the team sees that as,"Okay, that is now our problem, that we need to figure out how to address," that tells me something. And what I found is that the highest performing teams are the ones that take the latter approach, where they really regard problems that might manifest through any individual person as collective problems, because they recognize that collectively they have better resources to address them than any individual does by themselves.

Karen: 7:19

Yeah. When we shift the thinking from here is the source– the one source of the problem– that then has a pretty limited number of options for how you might solve it. When you shift to thinking here we are as a team with a problem that multiplies by orders of magnitude the potential solution. So if the problem is, as you were saying, your computer isn't working, maybe you know how to fix your computer, maybe you don't. That's kind of the choices you have. As soon as it's a team problem, any one of the team might know how to fix it or any one of the team can say,"What you're doing right now is more important than what I'm doing– use mine." Or I was about to go out to lunch, sit over here for right now or whatever that is. The options to solve even a pretty simple problem multiplie dramatically. Then you also have more choices to choose less painful options or,more effective options. Sometimes that problem turns out to reveal a whole new system that makes things better, even when there aren't problems. Huge discoveries happen because you're expanding your choices.

Paul: 8:31

So what I think we're saying here today is the question of whose fault it is is not necessarily a useful one to be asking. In fact it can be counterproductive. It's challenging to try to assume that there is a single fault. We want to do that because we want to address problems. We want to try to solve them. We want to try to move forward with them and our focused on individuals and individual causes sometimes gets in our way of actually doing that. When we can step into that space of"it doesn't matter where this came from, it's here now, and we need to deal with it"– if we can do that as a group and we do that collectively, we have a lot more resources and options for effectively solving the problem than if we try to narrow it down to one person or one thing, o ne cause.

Karen: 9:27

And as a bonus, we get a sense of connection with our team members that is really the space you always want to be in cause it feeds us. And that's your smooth team.

Paul: 9:38

Yeah. Well, I think that's going to do it for us for today until next time. I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: 9:43

And I'm Karen Gimnig, and this has been Employing Differences.