Why the rush to assign the blame? There is something calming about finding a target. It's like this moment of being lost in a rough sea of chaos and uncertainty. A person to assign the fault is like an unsinkable lifeboat to grasp. We climb aboard and take a deep breath and relax. "Well, that’s solved." We do it as individuals, we do it as organizations, we do it as a society. But what incredibly valuable opportunities lie in resisting this urge to assign fault? What might what we learn in what didn’t or did work if we explore a bit more?

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“An organization that isn’t changing is not, in fact, growing. Organizations that are not growing
are not inhaling and exhaling. They are not breathing. They are dead.”
Welcome to the Reboot Podcast.
I'm Dan Putt, one of the partners here at Reboot. What do you do when something goes wrong?
Do you freak out? Do you take it personally? Do you look for solutions? Do you look for
someone to blame? I had a moment like this a few months ago. For those who listen to the
podcast regularly, you probably heard about Reboot Circles, which are facilitated peer coaching
groups. I had the pleasure of developing these with my colleague, Andy Crissinger and I am
really proud of the spaces we have been able to create in a very short period of time. But things
have and do go wrong.
A few months ago, a member in our groups decided it was time for them to leave. My first
reaction, it was like a punch in the gut. My second reaction, I went looking for someone to blame
which for me, is almost always me. It doesn’t matter how much effort or creativity it takes, I can
almost always find a reason why I should be the one at fault, and this case was no different.
Instead of looking for more answers or trying to understand the situation better, I immediately
soaked in the self-shame.
Why the rush to assign the blame? There is something calming about finding a target. It's like
this moment of being lost in a rough sea of chaos and uncertainty. A person to assign the fault is
like an unsinkable lifeboat to grasp. We climb aboard and take a deep breath and relax. "Well,
that’s solved." We do it as individuals, we do it as organizations, we do it as a society. But what
incredibly valuable opportunities lie in resisting this urge to assign fault? What might what we
learn in what didn’t or did work if we explore a bit more?
Jerry is joined today by author and CTO, Dave Zwieback, to talk about just that. Dave, in his
book, 'Beyond Blame,' explores the fallacy of blame and how it fails to identify the immense
complexity and the interdependency of the world around us. It identifies the real cause in both
wins and losses. You might just find that often, blame prevents us from doing the very thing we
want the most: to learn and to grow.
A quick note: This conversation was originally recorded back in November so you will hear
mentions to specific events to that time, like the Paris attacks.
**
"The way to start would be, first, when we feel the tendency to blame, to try and get in touch with
what it feels like to be holding on to our self so tightly. What does it feel like to blame? How does
it feel to reject? What does it feel like to hate? What does it feel like to be righteously
indignant?" – Pema Chodron.
Jerry Colonna: Hey Dave, it's really great to see you and I'm looking forward to this
conversation.

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Dave Zwieback: Hi Jerry, it's really awesome to be here.
Jerry: Before we get started, why don’t you take a moment and tell us who you are? I'll
talk a little bit about why I am excited to have you on.
Dave: Sure. I have been working with large-scale system and teams for about two
decades, a little bit less than that, most of it in finance. I had a couple of startups
along the way and more recently, in the last five years, I have switched from
finance to the startup world. I'm very happy about that. As far as the book is
concerned –
Jerry: Yeah, you know, part of the reason we thought about having you on is, you've got
a new book coming out, called Beyond Blame, and I'd love you to tell us a little
bit about that. But before you even go forward, doing an interview with an author
is something I have not done before. I've interviewed and worked with and had
conversation with people who have written books, but not specifically about
books before. We've gotten enough of an audience right now that people are
reaching out and saying, hey, I've got a new book coming out and I generally
don’t do those things. I want to talk a little bit about this book in the context and I
think there is a relevancy here for the kinds of topics that we talk about. Tell us a
little bit about the book. The book is called Beyond Blame.
Dave: Yes and the subtitle is 'Learning from Failure and Success.' It's a short book. It's a
book in the style of the five dysfunctions of the team and so it's a book of fiction.
One of the most common pieces of feedback that I've gotten about the book is that
it feels very familiar to many of the folks that have worked in similar
environments. A lot of the behaviors that are in the book are default behaviors
with respect to kind of – especially with respect to learning or dealing with
failure. So, the names have been changed to protect the innocent of course, but the
fact that this book takes place in a financial institution is no accident. It is a very
personal book for me. Throughout my career, I have witnessed and been a part of
kind of – very sure of my work, a lot of fairly significant failures in the
environments where I have worked. What always struck me, after some time of
seeing these kind of patterns of blame happen again and again. And by the way,
when we talk about blame, we have to talk about the opposite of blame, which is
praise, but it roughly goes like this: something happens and if it's –
Jerry: Failure.
Dave: Well, it could also be success. So then what we do is, we want to construct a story
about why it happened and in both cases actually, both the case of success and
failure, we get to the person or people who did something or maybe didn’t do
something pretty quickly. In the case of a failure, "Oh, who fucked up?" Once we
find that person, we immediately feel a sense of relief or cognitive ease. This is
what Daniel Canavan [Phonetic] who studies these things, calls it. It's like, yeah,
we got the guy, or girl.

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Jerry: Right. We got them.
Dave: Right. Then if it is a failure, we know what to do. Depending on how bad the
failure is or was, we punish, sometimes we fire, reprimand, dock the bonus,
whatever. There's many different punitive measures that we can take. Similarly,
when things go well, we reward, we promote, we give them a bonus etc. So, after
seeing this play out again and again, what started to kind of strike me is that these
stories that we construct, comfortable as they might be, they are so simplistic.
Jerry: The story of what happened coming from a blame perspective; is that what you
mean?
Dave: Yes. The blame, basically what happens there is it's kind of a short circuit. The
moment we get to this comfortable story of basically who did it –
Jerry: Right, who is the bad guy?
Dave: Then we are like, okay that's it, we are done.
Jerry: Then we don’t have to inquire any more, we get to move on, we go back to our
work.
Dave: Yes, exactly.
Jerry: I just want to jump in for a moment here; I first became really acutely aware of
this as a methodology of inquiry by working with my friends at Etsy. We have a
mutual friend in John Allspaw, who is now the Chief Technology Officer. I began
seeing what they now refer to as retrospect is, but – what are commonly known as
post mortems, but added to that, this notion of a blameless post mortem. Just to
establish it, a blameless retrospective is if I've got this right, and inquiry into what
happened. Let's leave aside for a moment whether it was a failure or a success. An
inquiry into what happened, not designed to find fault, but to understand and
learn. Have I got that right?
Dave: Exactly, whereas the point of a traditional post mortem or retrospective might be
exactly to find who is at fault. The point of the blameless post mortem or, they are
known as learning reviews or, you know it has many different names for that
phenomena, the point is to learn. Sometimes, you know, there's something else.
When we go into these things, we are always looking for the root cause. One,
simple, root cause that we can fix. Sometimes it becomes a person, it's Bobby, or
Sue, or something. Where it starts to break down is – the reality is there is no
single root cause. It's far, far more complex than that.
Jerry: Why do we want to find a root cause?

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Dave: You know, especially as engineers – so I'm going to put my engineering hat on.
Generally, there is a comfort in that. If there is a root cause – and usually it's
something that we can do something about because in reality, if we take a more
realistic approach, we find a bunch of conditions. A lot of times there is not a
whole lot we can do about them.
Jerry: I have to tell you, we are sitting here and we are just a few days after – who
knows when we'll broadcast this, but we are just a few days after the horrific
event in Paris and Beirut last week. There's a seemingly deep challenge around
you know, a fundamentalist view of the world in which there are bad guys and
good guys and if we just find the bad guys and get rid of the bad guys, then our
problems go away. So, I'm sitting here with a lot of frustration at the lack of
nuance and understanding that the root cause, if you will, to turn the phrase on its
head, is really not a single person or a single point of view or a single ideology as
much as it is the belief that there is a root cause. That there isn’t a connectedness
to all of these things. Am I seeing this correctly?
Dave: Very much so. This is sort of how we are wired on some level and especially in
times of stress, we very much go there. It's like, "Don’t give me the nuance. I just
want to know who did this and who can I basically bomb to oblivion."
Jerry: Or whom can I hold accountable.
Dave: You bring up that word 'accountable'?
Jerry: Mm-hmm because I know, having read the book, you know, play a lot with this
notion of "accountability." Tell me about accountability and the relationship to a
blaming culture, versus a blameless approach to leadership.
Dave: The traditional, default definition of accountability, I think, basically translates to
whose throat am I going to choke when things go bad and also, who am I going to
promote etc and reward when things go correctly? I think it's largely kind of
unexamined notion because both the failures and successes, as I mentioned
before, they don’t really rest or rely with a single individual. So, in the default, or
the old way of thinking about accountability, accountability has the root account.
Just like a bank account, in the old view, accountability and account is something
that you settle. So, you fucked up, you pay the price. There's another view and it
comes to us from restorative justice, where an account in the context of
accountability is something you provide. You tell a full account, a full story of
what happened. Why? Two reasons: one, so that we can learn and two, so that the
community surrounding this individual can be restored. That's the restorative
aspect to restorative justice. So restorative justice, as you probably know, comes
from –you know, this is not the first year, this is not a new concept, it's been used
in South Africa and other places.

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Jerry: Right, in the Truth and Reconciliation movement post apartheid, the notion of
restorative justice was profoundly healing process, not merely the inquiry process.
It's a notion of recognizing that pain and suffering occur or, you know, to bring it
back into this organizational inquiry for a moment, recognizing that failures
occur, but in addition to failure there is also pain and suffering that occurs with
that failure. The application of a restorative justice approach to leadership is really
fascinating. Say more.
Dave: It is, I would say, very much about healing; not only the healing of the folks that
had been wronged, had suffered negative consequences of a particular action, but
also of the people who you might say are responsible for these actions. All these
notions, as you mentioned, John Allspaw is the gentleman who has brought a lot
of these concepts into our world of large scale computer systems, but he is
bringing that from the folks that have been studying human factors and
organization psychology, resilience engineering, complexity science and all that
stuff. So, in the safety science, if you wish, there's this concept of a second victim.
When that train collides and a bunch of people die, there's the first victim which
are the people that die or get hurt as a result of this train wreck, and there's a
second victim, which is usually the driver of the train, the pilot, the person who
took the system down. There's a number of situations where those folks descend
into deep depression or suicide. Self-blame goes on as much being blamed by
others. In many ways, it can actually be more serious, emotionally. The healing
that we are talking about through restorative justice, it happens not only on a
community level, the community being the people that are affected by some kind
of an outcome, but also on an individual level of the person who is supposedly
responsible for this. I listened to your podcast and I hear a lot of leaders and
startups talk about this, and it really resonates with me because as CEO of a
company, somebody who is responsible for the outcome of this venture,
responsible to all the VCs and all the people that work in the startup, their careers
and their livelihoods are on the line.
Jerry: Right.
Dave: Whenever something goes wrong, that element of self-blame is so present. I've
noticed that a lot.
Jerry: Yes, I think you are absolutely right. We've often, on the show, whether it is in
our bootcamps even in our individual client sessions with some of the Reboot
coaches, we almost always end up talking about failure and fear of failure. One of
the more important techniques that I will use with somebody is, I will ask them to
go there and really imagine the worst consequences of that failure. It almost
always ends with them, and we joke, homeless and penniless, and laughing stock
of Stockholm. That is because a client once said to me, because he's originally
from Stockholm, and the notion of humiliation and shame. Shame is very much
part of that self blame. Isn’t it?

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Dave: Yes.
Jerry: When we think about some of the struggles that are so dominant in the startup
community, so much is on the line for people. There's so much of a sense of fear
of failing that ironically, we exacerbate a blame culture because ultimately, if I
am worried about shame, then I am taking on the responsibility for the failure
even if there is a complex system that failed, even if it is a nuance system of
failing.
Dave: Yes.
Jerry: Inherent in the notion of Beyond Blame is not only in my view, not only the
promise of an inquiry process into what's working and what's not working that is
true and honest, but also releasing from that self-blame and potentially the fear of
shame.
Dave: Yes.
Jerry: Does this land for you?
Dave: Yes. I think you hit a very non-obvious nail on the head. It kind of for me gets to
this notion of how much control we think we have over our own lives and our
circumstances. In order to survive in the world where realistically we don’t have
any control. Sorry, bad news. But in order to survive and function in a kind of a
hopeless world, we have to tell ourselves these stories.
Jerry: A story that we actually have control, or a story that things are certainly highly
depended upon us as opposed to being interdependent and interconnected with all
these other pieces.
Dave: Yes. The thing is, the success stories are just mirror images of the failure stories.
'So and so founded a company that is now valued at a billion dollars.'
Jerry: Right, the unicorn.
Dave: Right. Then it's like, 'Wow, there's something special about that person.'
Jerry: Right, they are smarter than the rest of us.
Dave: Exactly. They work harder. This is where all the case study stuff starts to totally
break down because you know, all those founders of those unicorns, they do
things in particular ways. I doubt that there is actually a lot in common, but
anyway, if you look you can probably find, but one of the things you might be
able to find is that they all have regular bowel movements.
Jerry: Right. Shocking huh?

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Dave: As a consultant, your recommendation, based on the case study of a hundred or
ten unicorn companies is that your CEO should have a diet rich in fiber, and that
will help you. There's a whole, as you know, genre of people talking about the
things that they think contribute to their success or to their failures. Myth-making.
Story-telling. Sense-making. Is it reality? I think reality is a lot more complex and
nuanced than that. This is 2500 years ago, the historical Buddha, Buddha
Shakyamuni, he was talking about all this. He was talking about complexity. The
way that he talked about it was, you know, interdependence. This inability, unless
you reach Buddha-hood, you know, enlightenment, this ability to really know,
how things manifest, what are the causes and conditions as he talks about, that are
necessary for a particular outcome. The Buddha talked about impermanence,
which by the way, if you are looking for the root cause of anything –
Jerry: It's impermanence.
Dave: Both the functioning and the malfunctioning complex systems, it is the fact that
things are changeable. This is not new. I think that because we are able to
construct these systems and companies of such immense complexity and scale so
quickly, that is kind of bringing all those things that the Buddha has talked about
2500 years ago into sharp focus. If you've built your little hut somewhere out
there and all you really have to worry about is your five acres or whatever it is
that you lived on, you could sort of get away with a very simplistic understanding
of how things work in the world. When you build a system that is 100,000
computers or a million computers that a million people use, you can't get away
with this. You cannot actually operate that system without coming face-to-face
with complexity, impermanence, interdependence all those things.
Jerry: I think you are right and we both share a fascination with the study of the
Dharma; some of the things that you speak about in the book that really struck
me, and I'm smiling as I say this because I recognize it, is that not only do I think
that so much of the challenge of managing and waiting within our complex
interdependent nuanced environment, not only is that complicated by the notion
that there is that change and impermanence is not the norm. Change and
impermanence are the norm, but you have a line in here that really struck me; you
said, "Any system that is functioning is, in fact, changing."
Dave: Yes.
Jerry: The blame-seeking leadership mentality I believe is rooted in a few fallacies, one
of which is that there is some nirvana state in which organizations are not
changing.
Dave: Yes.

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Jerry: And there is that state; you know what that state is? It's called the dead
organization.
Dave: Yes.
Jerry: The one that no longer exists. Just like uncertainty is an expression of life itself,
even though uncertainty creates anxiety and challenge for us, change and its
consequences of success and failure, because that's what changed us, it created
surprises; pleasant surprises and unpleasant surprises. Change is a byproduct of
aliveness within the organization. The organization that isn’t changing is not in
fact growing. Organizations that are not growing are not inhaling and exhaling.
They are not breathing. They are dead.
Dave: Yes, 100%. The very reason that you might start a company is because you want
to change something. It's because there is something that you are unsatisfied with
and something that bothers you and you see a better world. Even in that, it's
inherent. It's in there.
Jerry: What's in there?
Dave: Well, in order to get there, it requires change.
Jerry: Yes.
Dave: And it also requires a belief in the fact that these things are changeable. It's there,
this kind of understanding that, I'm going to try. I don’t know if I'm going to
succeed, but I think this thing can work. It's just that we forget, again, how –
blame, I think you are quite right, it has this freezing effect in the same way that
anxiety has that. It freezes things and they feel immovable and static and dead.
Jerry: Yes. I guess the leadership challenge is just like one teaching is learning to be
comfortable with uncertainty, the leadership challenge is to go beyond blame,
your book, to get to a point of not acceptance of mistakes, but the use of mistakes,
the use of failure, the use of unpleasant surprises if you will, as an opportunity to
really examine root assumptions and core beliefs and see what needs to be
changed and altered to accommodate a new belief system.
Dave: Yes, it's like a wakeup call. You hear a bell and it's like, "Okay, here, take a look
at me. There's something here for you." Probably a gift, a present, certainly an
opportunity for growth. It's painful also.
Jerry: It also requires time and it requires patience. Two things that often seem in short
supply in the startup world.
Dave: Yes, well, we are busy, but the question is, are we busy with the right things? To
me, when I do this work and when I talk to folks, and I talk to folks in a lot of

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different organizations about this thing about blame, the first thing that strikes me
is how unaware most of the time we are that it's actually there.
Jerry: The blame is implicit even if it is not explicit.
Dave: Yes, like how much blame there is in our organization and in our lives, in our
personal lives also. If you approach a random person on the street and you ask
him, is there any blame in your relation? Chances are they'll say, no, of course
not. But then when you actually sit with him and you talk with him for a little
while and you start to discover that you know, the behaviors that they do to save
themselves from being blamed from the shame. They do this on a personal level,
they do this on an organizational level. How much blaming we actually do as
individuals, even towards the ones we love the most; our family, our friends. You
start to see that it's so endemic. I don’t want us to blame ourselves for being
blameful, you know, because that I think part of a human condition. We need to
just own it and by becoming aware of it, we actually have a chance of doing
something different with it.
Jerry: It reminds me of something that I heard attributed to Chogyam Trungpa
Rinpoche, one of my Buddhist teachers, and he said, "Pain is just pain. Pain is not
punishment and pleasure is not a reward. Pain is just pain and pleasure is just
pleasure." If you play with that quote a little bit, you get to the heart of, I think the
blame-seeking mentality, both when I'm seeking to blame myself and when I'm
seeking to blame others. Something is wrong so therefore, somebody has to be
wrong. I think the observation that he made was, sometimes things just don’t go
right. Actually it's more helpful to understand what happened than it is to actually
seek to figure out who did it.
Dave: Yes, exactly.
Jerry: There's another Buddhist story that comes to mind which is, a man is shot in the
chest with a poisoned arrow. The response is not "Who shot that arrow? Why did
he shoot that arrow?" The first response is, "Take the damn arrow out of his chest.
Close up the wound, and then we'll sort through what happened." I think too often
in our organizations, we ignore the poisoned arrow in the chest and we go after
the person that we think shot the arrow.
Dave: And then two people die.
Jerry: That's right. So, last question Dave, as I said to you even before, one of the things
that I like to really explore is why we do what we do. Why did you write this
book? Why is this so important to you?
Dave: It's very deeply personal for me. My background is I was born and raised in
Russia, and that is what you might call, not a blameless culture. In fact, I think I
don’t want to let my fellow countrymen down, I think the Russians, we take

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blame to some incredible heights. You know, why do something haphazardly if
you can take it the next level? So there's that and also – I mean, I can give you a
story from my life; I have two kids, and one of them is eight years old now.
Initially, we discovered that what you might call he wasn’t very good at math. We
had that belief and it's a very innocent blameful statement. It's like, we have
attached something very solid to his personality. I lived in that world for a little
while and because I was doing all this work and writing the book and we also
have a workshop that teaches a lot of these concepts, I started to see that – okay
that's an interesting story, but the reality is much more nuanced and complex.
There's something in the system within which my son is operating and learning
math, which includes me, includes my wife, includes the school and it does
include him, of course. There's something that's not working. Yes, this approach
might work for 99% of other kids, but it's not working for him. I recognized that
he is not showing up to – when we sit down and try to do the homework, he is not
showing up trying to figure out how he can screw me and how he can make me
mad and upset about the fact that he is not getting it. He is really showing up in
good faith, what we might call, and really trying to it and he can't. He's frustrated.
At some point, when I saw this, the story that I was constructing about him was
just that. It was just a story. It wasn’t actually true. It really helped me break
through and develop much more patience and start to really kind of seek out
different ways. Okay maybe it didn’t work this way, let me try a different way to
teach you. It had such a profound effect on our relationship. For me, as I said, it is
very personal. It's not just about organizational level or learning from failure and
success and so on. I mean, those are of course important, but this stuff is endemic
in our lives, in our relationships.
Jerry: What's your son's name?
Dave: Zach.
Jerry: In the story you tell about Zach, what occurs to me is that – well, I relate as a
parent because I can imagine blaming myself for my child's brokenness and their
inability to learn the subject.
Dave: Yes.
Jerry: In that feeling I recognize that – when I speak about math, it recalls for me that I
struggled with math in eight grade after doing very, very well, and really feeling
lost and broken as a result of that. I created a limiting belief within myself that
said, I was not good at. I think that the shift that occurred for you, I imagine,
maybe giving Zach the space to simply be Zach and not live up to your
expectations about his own performance in math simply by removing the seeking
of blame from the situation. It created the space for him to actually just be a kid
who has some skills in some things and less skills in other things, and maybe need
to learn this way versus that way.

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Dave: Yes.
Jerry: Just like all of us.
Dave: Yes and the space to be authentically himself, which includes frustration and
sometimes anger at this math thing that is not going so well. By the way, it's
going better now. That's the other thing that kind is a result of that space. We start
to re-examine this belief that which felt so solid and immovable before that Zack
isn’t good at math. Actually, no, not at all.
Jerry: Right. It's a beautiful connecting point because as we often say, when you
understand some of the roots, you start to see the broader application of some of
the things. In this case, I really want to thank you for sharing your ideas and
talking about this. I think the notion of creating blameless or going beyond blame
in our cultures, just like it did for Zach, creates the opportunity for spaciousness
for the individual to show up. I often use a line when I talk about the work that we
do at Reboot, and I say, "My wish is to spark a revolution where we create work
that is nonviolent to the self, nonviolent to the community and nonviolent to the
planet." If we can do those things, then we have really gone beyond work in the
old view. I think the first step in creating that nonviolent organization is to
actually remove blame from the process. That's not to say that people who are not
doing well in their jobs should not be approached. That's not what we are talking
about. We are talking about this notion of moving beyond a simplified, simplistic,
fundamentalist view of organizations into a much more complex, nuanced,
humanistic view of the way people actually operate.
Dave: Yes. Underlying all of this, we cannot get there without awareness.
Jerry: Yes.
Dave: You cannot go beyond blame without awareness. You cannot build nonviolent
companies without awareness. At the end of the day, this is really what we are
talking about.
Jerry: That's beautiful. My last quote and then we'll end it is, to quote my partner Khaled
Halim who likes to say that what we are really about, is smuggling
inconsciousness into organizations.
Dave: Yes.
Jerry: Thank you so much for coming on the show Dave. It's really been a delight to talk
to you and I look forward to hearing reactions to our conversation today.
Dave: Thank you so much Jerry.
**

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So, that’s it for our conversation today. You know, a lot was covered in this episode from links,
to books, to quotes, to images; so we went ahead and compiled all that, and put it on our site at
Reboot.io/podcast. If you’d like to be a guest on the show, you can find out about that on our site
as well. I’m really grateful that you took the time to listen. If you enjoyed the show and you want
to get all the latest episodes as we release them, head over to iTunes and subscribe and while
you’re there, it would be great if you could leave us a review, letting us know how the show
affected you. So, thank you again for listening, and I really look forward to future conversations
together.
[Singing]
“How long till my soul gets it right?
Did any human being ever reach that kind of light?
I call on the resting soul of Galileo,
King of night-vision, King of insight.”
[End of audio 0:45:01]
[End of transcript]