Most people who have worked in Corporate America for a few years eventually encounter what is commonly called a culture of blame. Organizations who become more focused on attributing blame rather than focusing on understanding and resolving the actual problems. Even those who don’t actively participate in attributing blame in such environments find that they must adopt a strategy of deflecting blame, which effectively only reinforces the problem. I knew the history of blame and scapegoating had a long history, but I had no idea just how far back this concept goes in our culture possibly as far back as 2500 years.

The term “Scapegoating” has a history going back just about to the beginning of recorded history, being referenced in the book of Leviticus, which scholars believe is dated somewhere around 500 – 300 BCE. One of the earliest records of the tradition is in the old testament of the bible, where a priest casts the sins of a village onto a calf, which is then sent into the wilderness, thereby purging the community of sin for a time. In other societies various things would carry the evil, ranging from inanimate objects to people. In ancient Greece a single person – frequently a crippled or in other way disfigured beggar – would be cast out of the city in response to natural disasters or turns of the calendar. Digging even further, we come to the related practice of the sacred kings, an ennobled ruler of a society who was believed to have control over weather, the harvest and sometimes the very welfare of a society. They were sacrificed in time of trial or harvest. Of particular interest for those in large hierarchical organizations, some historians theorize that the role of sacred king only emerged in stratified, hierarchal societies. In the 15th century the British monarchy established the official role of “Whipping boy” as a means of punishing the royalty, who were believed to be ordained by god and beyond reproach. This unfortunately tasked child would ceremonially receive disciplinary measures for the misbehaviors of their designated prince. Suffice to say, the concept of externalizing runs deep in human society.

Mercifully, we seem to have moved beyond human sacrifices and physical ostracism, but the idea still thrives in many modern contexts. How many times have you seen the success – or failure – a project or even chance occurrence be attributed to the actions of an individual? Or if we look to politics, how quickly either side is to home in all the current problems upon a defined “other” such as illegal immigrants, corporate executives, the educated “elite”, or the uneducated “poor” to name just a few. As René Girard observed, the concept of transferring anger, frustration and other ill feelings from one being to another has lost the religious veneer it featured in times of antiquity, but the practice remains today.  I find it humbling to see that in some ways, the challenges we see in modern organizations are not so much a new challenge, merely a manifestation of problems we have been dealing with for a very long time.

The challenge of course is that this externalization and blame prevents us from actually learning and improving that which has happened. In fact, in some ways today’s subtle transference is more dangerous than the public versions from earlier times. Laying the evil and misdeeds of a community onto a goat and ceremonially expelling them is a pretty obvious measure. Attributing blame to another to explain the current problems at work is less obvious and may cloud our ability to properly see and assess our own abilities. How much can this impact our ability to actually plan and assess? Quite a bit. In 1994 Amos Tversky and Daniel Khaneman first began testing what has become known as the “Planning Fallacy“, where they compared people’s estimates of how long it would take to complete various tasks against how long it would take to complete. They found people consistently underestimated how long it would take to complete work, even when looking at prior examples. All told, only about 30% of people made estimates that were below or within the time range it took to complete the work. When dealing with people’s own experiences, they were quick to dismiss anything that went wrong as being a unique one off event due to outcome beyond their doing and something that should not be incorporated in future estimates.

This sort of thinking is antithetical to any sort of empirical process control, as it actively creates a distortion of reality to reinforce a narrative of extreme individual accountability. Indeed, the more I think about it and reflect upon some of my own experiences, it seems failing to confront this sort of culture early on will undermine just about any sort of Agile or Lean transformation.