Dis Hope

In so, it’s easy to blame. When it’s not the structure of consciousness or the structure of reality. Or it is, because of people’s choices. Choose differently and we can make reality different! Besides, it’s good for washing dishes.

APPLICATION

The move described here, recognizing that blame is a response to the structure of a situation rather than only to the choices within it, is useful for leaders navigating organizational uncertainty. When a project fails, when a strategy does not land, when a team underperforms, the instinct is to locate the failure in a person or a decision. That instinct is often wrong and always incomplete. Complex and wicked problems have emergent properties that no individual choice caused and no individual correction will fix. The leader who can step back from blame and ask instead what structural conditions produced this outcome, and what structural changes could produce a different one, is practicing the kind of systems thinking that uncertainty demands. Choosing differently is possible, but only once you have correctly identified what it is that needs to change.