Blame and Learning Rarely Walk Hand-in-Hand

Peter Aten
3 min readSep 30, 2021

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Are you familiar with the phrase “one throat to choke”? It was quite popular at a former employer of mine where leaders used the term to reinforce the benefits of having a single point of accountability (and blame) on any project or task of importance. Clear accountability is a point that I agree with, but associating the potential for failure with the threat of pain or (career) death is a curious form of motivation. To me it seems to reinforce the finding that 1 in 5 business leaders are psychopaths.

While I didn’t find it very inspirational, is this approach effective? Fear can be a powerful motivator, especially in the very short term. If your time horizon is very short, your focus limited to a near term deliverable, then fear may be an effective tool to inspire others to achieve that goal. The Soviets apparently used this technique successfully to motivate troops in the Battle of Stalingrad, killing retreating soldiers as an example to others.

But what about the next project/feature/challenge? Aside from the fact that it’s a competitive market for talent and most people don’t like to put up with this crap, a study at Google concluded that the single greatest factor predicting high team performance is psychological safety, exactly what a blame-based approach seeks to undermine.

An alternative to a blame-based approach is to focus on learning. Mistakes and failures will happen. In fact, if you’re engaged in anything remotely innovative or challenging and failures don’t happen, you could argue that your team is not stretching themselves. Failure is not the objective, but failure is an opportunity to learn, to be better going forward. However, group learning requires psychological safety to explore how the group fell short and can improve without throwing people overboard.

Learning and accountability are not mutually exclusive. The Google study also found that dependability (“team members get things done on time and meet Google’s high bar for excellence”) was an important attribute, and it’s true that not every team member will prove to be a good fit on every team. The key difference is the approach to failure; are we working together to learn what went wrong and how we can do better, which may or may not lead us to identify a pattern associated with an individual, or are we looking from the start to cast blame and create a scapegoat?

Are we all in this together? Developing a learning culture takes more than words and good intentions. Trust is lost more easily than it is gained and there are lots of ways that you or others can signal blame without saying anything as egregious as “one throat to choke.” When stuff hits the fan, as it eventually will, it will take strength and discipline to make sure that no hint of blame is allowed into the conversation from teammates or leadership.

You have a choice. Do you want a blame-based organization focused on (at best) short-term deliverables, or a learning organization focused on continuous improvement and long-term high performance? Blame and learning rarely walk hand-in-hand. These are mutually exclusive choices, and as a leader your words and actions will reinforce one or the other.

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Peter Aten

Interested in making great software, and particularly in how to make teams more effective