This is How Effective Leaders Move Beyond Blame

Blame culture hides the real drivers of failure. Zwieback argues that pointing at a person or team gives a convenient story but stops learning, leaving the underlying system fragilities untouched. When organizations remove blame, they can surface the conditions that actually caused an incident and address them.

He cites the Symantec breach, Volkswagen diesel scandal, and Citigroup rigging allegations to show how focusing on a few "bad apples" misses the complex incentives, pressures, and process gaps that enable the wrongdoing. Without those insights, companies fire individuals but never fix the systemic problems that let the behavior happen again.

The solution is a learning review instead of a traditional postmortem. Reviews are run after every experiment or iteration, not just after a failure, and they aim to capture both what went wrong and what went right. Building a timeline with input from all affected roles creates a shared, unbiased account. The facilitator's job is to listen, synthesize, and keep the conversation on context rather than culpability.

Safety and immunity are essential. By treating participants as witnesses rather than suspects, organizations encourage full disclosure, prevent evidence tampering, and retain the knowledge of those closest to the incident. The process borrows from restorative justice: offer protection in exchange for information that can dramatically improve system resilience.

When teams adopt learning reviews, they gain a clearer picture of hidden trade-offs, incentive misalignments, and hidden dependencies. That knowledge fuels concrete improvements, reduces repeat failures, and builds a culture where accountability means fixing the system, not punishing individuals.