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Blame or Solutions?

8 January, 2019 by James Lawther 2 Comments

Finding Blame

Blame is natural The minute something goes wrong we seek out somebody to blame.  Somebody to take the rap.  It is human nature to find a fall guy when things go belly up. Blame is easy We live in a connected world.  We work within a mesh of colleagues, customers and suppliers, so there are […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: blame, culture, root cause analysis

Taking the Sting out of Failure

2 December, 2018 by James Lawther 2 Comments

The failure A couple of years ago I had a workplace nightmare.  I was pushing a big initiative and I needed it to be a success.  I had my boss’s boss on my back and the project was going belly up.  It was all very unpleasant. There were a few rays of light.  A couple […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: Aviation Safety Reporting System, blame, culture, human nature, trust

Failing to Learn

23 July, 2018 by James Lawther 6 Comments

Flight 1549 On the 15th of January 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 struck a flock of canada geese as it was climbing away from New York City’s LaGuardia Airport.  The plane lost all engine power.  The pilots, Chesley Sullenberger and Jeffrey Skiles, were forced to land on the River Hudson off Midtown Manhattan. Boats rescued […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: blame, culture, error proofing, human nature, incentives, learning, reinforcing behaviour

The World’s Most Toxic Culture?

5 July, 2018 by James Lawther 4 Comments

The Four Pests

Organisational culture If you have been reading this blog for a while you will have noticed that I am a caught in a repeating loop.  The human equivalent of a stuck record. I write about organisational improvement.  There are lots of fascinating advances in technology, management thinking and other whiz-bang solutions that I could pontificate […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: blame, command and control, culture, human nature, incentives, management style, rhetoric, targets

Scapegoating and the Black Magic of Work Creation

5 March, 2018 by James Lawther 4 Comments

Scapegoat

An imaginary tale… Picture a high pressure environment.  Resources are stretched and the work keeps on coming. Jobs are routinely prioritised so that staff can focus on what is important. That isn’t an uncommon scenario, maybe it is ringing bells, so let me make it a little more dramatic by upping the stakes. Imagine it was […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: blame, bureaucracy, fear and anxiety, mitigating demand, office productivity, over-processing

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