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Understanding how bureaucracy develops

(dhruvmethi.substack.com)
192 points dhruvmethi | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.205s | source
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sevensor ◴[] No.41889622[source]
When you treat every negative outcome as a system failure, the answer is more systems. This is the cost of a blameless culture. There are places where that’s the right answer, especially where a skilled operator is required to operate in an environment beyond their control and deal with emergent problems in short order. Aviation, surgery. Different situations where the cost of failure is lower can afford to operate without the cost of bureaucratic compliance, but often they don’t even nudge the slider towards personal responsibility and it stays at “fully blameless.”
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1. oooyay ◴[] No.41897147[source]
I feel like this comment is emblematic of a dramatic misunderstanding of blameless post mortems. They're pretty simple; systems that fail can be attributed to teams, practices, systems of understanding, etc which is diametrically opposed to individuals. Blameless culture isn't a culture without blame, in fact there's plenty of blame that should be listed in contributing factors - including the accountable team (if there is one). There's just no, "John Smith did x and y failed" because that's rarely, if ever, succinctly how systems fail.