Shape of... a Pear!

[mangosteen]

A few thoughts on what happens when projects go ugly:

There will be some projects where no one is going to come out okay. It's over time, it's over budget, and every person on it can be validly accused of something unpleasant.

Observation: Everyone can be playing by the rules, and emergent behavior can still screw everyone over, regardless.


New game, n players.
Every person individually gets a choice.

A. They can start blaming everyone around them, complete with email trails with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each message explaining how everyone screwed up except them.

OR

B. They can shoulder part of the blame, start figuring out what systemically went wrong, and do the hard work of going through the entire system in their head, taking it apart, putting it back together, and come up with an answer for what to do next time.


Choice A will not always be frowned upon, and choice B will not always be rewarded, and sometimes reward and punishment might be reversed, because that's just the way the organization might be set up (in which case, run far away if you can).

In the end, though, it is a test of character and trust. It's effectively an Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma problem, iterated over an entire career.

Realization: "We got it done, and I never want to work with them again" is only about half a notch up from "We didn't get it done."

Comments

[muffyjo]

One of the things I love about my current workplace is that while people are held responsible for their actions, blame is not really part of the company system. Mostly it's "well, this is what we have to deal with now. Let's move in this direction to solve it." Which is novel and amazingly encouraging.

I swear, I never thought this kind of an environment ever could exist in real life.

[sweh.livejournal.com]

It's amazing how attitudes change when I say "I'm not trying to place blame; I'm just trying to work out what went wrong and what we can do to fix it". Previously defensive people become very co-operative!

I leave the blame throwing to others.

[dsrtao]

I am happy to report that my company does not seem to have a concept of blame. We have shared responsibility for making things work; we have, occasionally, people who do not shoulder their burdens. Mistakes are, really, object lessons (and sometimes the lesson is that random chance happens).

[fj.livejournal.com]

Sometimes it is not even half a notch. If the people you never want to work with again were the Proj/Prog Managers in charge of parceling or structuring or requiring the work, sometimes not pulling the coals out of the fire they created is a very good learning opportunity for them.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Observation: Everyone can be playing by the rules, and emergent behavior can still screw everyone over, regardless.

Mos' def. Traffic is my favorite example--we can all share the same goal, and yet all of us are worse than any of us would be.