On blaming

[photo by pixabay]

 

 During my readings of "The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time" from Jeff Sutherland, I came over the Milgram experiment and the blaming topic. 

The experiment was about Authority and also about the question if the Holocaust was caused by just following orders.

As mentioned on Wikipedia[1], three individuals took part in each session of the experiment:

• The "experimenter", who was in charge of the session.
• The "teacher", a volunteer for a single session. The "teachers" were led to believe that they were merely assisting, whereas they were actually the subjects of the experiment.
• The "learner", an actor and confederate of the experimenter, who pretended to be a volunteer.

The teacher was asking the learning word pairs and for wrong answers the learner gets an electric shock with increasing voltage from wrong answer to answer. If the teacher wanted to stop the experiment, the experimenter used words to force the teacher to continue [2]

 

1. Please continue or Please go on.
2. The experiment requires that you continue.
3. It is absolutely essential that you continue.
4. You have no other choice; you must go on.

 The majority of the teacher got to the maximum voltage. 

Now, many years later, this experiment is a great source to analyse and a great sample for asking questions. It got quite common in the past decade on the court yards and also off them to always look for a guilty person. But does this mean, everybody just has to follow orders? Asking about the experiment, who did it wrong leads to a wrong mindset. Is is none of the participants it is the experiment itself. The teachers and the experimenter did simply said just their job. Blaming the teachers as they were the persons who did the electric shocks might be the easy "solution", but is it? Many of the teachers were heavily stressed and if started to doubt the experimenter tried to push them to continue.

As a conclusion and takeaway, recognize stress in the teams to prevent errors is at least important as avoiding to blame persons. Remember from the previous post, a decision of a person to a specific time is always correct, it depends on the system around. 

Also in case of something wents wrong and you know the external cause, you probably can react with an answer like "it is not my fault, it is because...". Take a moment before answering that way. What does this answer helps to solve the problem? What can you do to prevent this next time. Do not blame, improve the system!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment 

[2] http://library.nhsggc.org.uk/mediaAssets/Mental%20Health%20Partnership/Peper%202%2027th%20Nov%20Milgram_Study%20KT.pdf

[photo] https://pixabay.com/de/photos/schuldig-fingerzeig-deuten-3096217/