Have we lost sight of the importance of culpability?

I’ve always maintained an attitude of trying something, while trying to remain fearless - but always maintained I would do this with awareness. Sometimes I'll admit, this prevents me from doing the "thing" as I'm overcome with fear of failure (hello imposter syndrome).

We live in a world where “it’s ok to make mistakes”. Often in software delivery under the guise of agile, you’re protected by the cushions of “shared responsibility” and “no blame culture”. Years ago, I thought this was a cushion I enjoyed; it gave me a feeling of mental security, freedom, and the ability to learn.

More so as time goes on, I feel the fear of failure or worse repercussions from mistakes could be healthy, and a driver in not making too many...

Doing things wrong is the start of learning. I like the mantra of allowing failure because it breeds learning. But it is only the start. The awareness you’ve done something wrong is key to this, allowing you to self-reflect, improve and change your approach next time.

In my day today, I sometimes see the second aspect overlooked, with an emergent trend to look at the “we” instead of the “I”. I’ve seen a constant pattern of advice being ignored, and when it goes wrong no one can make the links back to a decision made against the advice of someone; it's a complex network of decisions that lead to the outcome, and solemnly do people go back to the root cause. The go-to when this arises, is “we must move forward”.

This is a dangerous cultural problem. If we (I mean ‘I’) are not aware of the outcomes of our decisions and take no responsibility for them, we will continue doing them unbeknown to the destruction that lay in our wake, verging into the territory of possible willful blindness.

Yet here we are, an accepted part of the software delivery cycle?

A recent study found that when we obey the orders of others that go off plan, we feel more guilty than those who made the decision. While others looking in, generally didn’t hold the person who followed orders to be responsible, the person who carried out the actions blamed themselves more.

This drives me to ask the question, how often are you checking in that decisions you’ve made have gone well? That your analysis was right? That what you've released into production is working?

We should be seeking to lift the burden of bad decisions off those potentially working off the back of our decisions, and with frequent checking in, we can take ownership of problems and help with working the problem.

I still make an effort to this day, to check in on projects I may have touched half a decade ago, to ensure the decisions I made were still good and that nothing bad has come out of them. Why? Because it reinforces or changes my current approach to software development, by owning my past mistakes.

Why not check in on a bit of work you've done? Maybe you'll learn something.