Elephant in the Blameless War Room: Accountability
We’ve always advocated that every company can benefit from a blameless culture. Fostering a blameless culture can profoundly boost your organization in powerful ways, from employee retention to developer velocity and innovation. However, there’s an elephant in the room when we talk about blamelessness with executives: accountability. When things go wrong, people still need to get fired, right?
In a discussion with Ajay Varia, former VPE of MasterClass and COO of Emeritus, he shared an example of a real incident and how he held space for a blameless resolution without sacrificing accountability. An engineer was making changes to the administrative panel of what they thought was a testing environment. Regrettably, it turned out to actually be controlling the production environment. Their changes caused a significant outage for the service.
