"Blame feels like leadership, but it isn’t"

After the scramble to hit our go-live, everyone had an opinion about what went wrong.

Most people responded with relief that we’d made it.
But one voice stood out.

The them in question was the team who had broken down the work, and missed a few pieces along the way.

It sounded like leadership.
It felt like accountability.
But it was something else.

Of course, there were lessons to be learned.
We needed to reflect on how we’d missed things, and how to reduce that risk next time.
But blame doesn’t help us do that.
Blame closes the conversation when what we really need is to keep it open.

Because here’s the thing:
The future is unknowable.
We all make the next best move based on what we can see at the time.

It’s only after the outcome unfolds that we start telling ourselves a story about what should have happened.
And that’s when blame enters the room.

But in complexity, the real work isn’t fixing them.
It’s staying in the conversation with them, making sense of what happened, together.
Not as judge. Not as fixer. But as participant.

Where might you be tempted to close the story with blame…
when the real leadership move is to keep the conversation open?

Until next time,
Dermot
​The Messy Middle

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