practice blameless problem solving

Mary Johnson

Fundamental #7: practice blameless problem-solving.

Demonstrate a relentless solution focus, rather than pointing fingers or dwelling on problems. Identify lessons learned and use those lessons to improve ourselves and our processes so we don’t make the same mistake twice. Get smarter with every mistake. Learn from every experience.

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December 14, 2022

TRE Roots: Root #6 – Practice Blameless Problem-Solving

Apply your creativity, spirit, and enthusiasm to developing solutions, rather than pointing fingers and dwelling on problems. Identify lessons learned and use every experience to improve our processes so we don’t make the same mistake again. Get smarter with every mistake.

Our work to support people is driven by complex needs and requires us to consider the individual desires of each of these people. This means we are often working to solve challenging problems. Practicing blameless problem-solving is important because we must work together, learn from one another’s’ experiences, and use mistakes and failures as the building blocks to solutions. Failures and mistakes are as important to solving problems as successes, I would say even more important. When teams and organizations are successful at practicing blameless problem-solving, there is high trust and accountability. Individuals and teams are not afraid to admit when something does not work as planned. Mistakes and failures are seen as experiences that provide us with more information than we had before. The group works together toward success which drives stronger outcomes for the people we support. Everyone feels a part of the effort and a contributor to the success.

Teams and organizations who are not effective at practicing blameless problem-solving are often splintered and individually driven. Success is about the individual or the team, rather than about the outcomes for the person we are supporting. The outcome achieved may or may not benefit the person in services. We must approach problem-solving with a focus on the final goal we want to accomplish rather than judging another person or group as to the reason it has not worked. This includes how we approach peers on our own team, other teams, outside partners, family and caregivers, and our state systems.

I recently had to check myself on how I was thinking about one of our state partners and the decisions they were making. I was being judgmental of them and the way they are managing the situation. This mindset was affecting how I spoke and interacted with them and did not help either of us solve the problem before us. Once I shifted my mindset towards partnering with them to solve the problem and share respectfully my experiences of the direction they were taking (without judgement), the conversation opened up significantly. It is too soon to really know if we will reach the outcomes I am hoping for, but I feel that now I am influencing those outcomes. I was not influencing it positively in my original approach.

As you go about your work, consider the following:

• Take time out to reflect on recent or current situations where a problem needs to be solved. What does blameless problem-solving look like in that situation? How can you support blameless problem-solving moving forward?
• What are some problems that are important for you, your team, and our organization to address? How can we work together to practice blameless problem-solving?
• Talk within your team or with your peers about groups with whom you work well together to solve problems. Why does it work well with that/those group(s)? What about groups where if feels as if there is blame for the problem(s). Why is that? What can you and your team do to change that?
• Share examples of practicing blameless problem-solving and what you or your team were able to accomplish.

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Practice Blameless Problem Solving

Demonstrate a relentless solution focus, rather than pointing fingers or dwelling on problems. Find common ground, identify lessons learned, and use those lessons to improve yourselves and your processes so we don’t make the same mistake twice. Get smarter with every mistake. Learn from every experience.

End the Blame Game: Use Corporate Culture to Focus on Solutions

By Carole Wehn

It’s not our fault the job is on hold.  The supplier sent the wrong parts.

It’s not my fault the project wasn’t completed in time.  Accounting never gave me the budget figures.

I would have closed the sale, but the competitor came in with a ridiculously low bid.

These are all examples of the blame culture at work.   In each case, productivity slowed because someone wasn’t accountable and didn’t ensure that targets were met and goals achieved.  Even worse, these examples indicate that employees might have been afraid to step up and take ownership of a problem for fear of confrontation or reprisal.

What Is Blame Culture?

The Oxford Review defines blame culture as “an environment where people or groups/teams of people are frequently singled out, blamed, and criticized, and fault is apportioned out for mistakes and errors.”  People are targeted when things go wrong, not the business operations. 

Blame culture asks, “who dropped the ball?” instead of “where did our systems and processes fail?”   The focus is on the individuals, not the processes.  It’s much easier to point fingers at a person or department instead of doing the harder, but the more beneficial, exercise of fixing the root cause, so the problem does not happen again.

Why Are We So Quick to Blame Others?

Blaming others is a contagious behavior!   A study reported in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology showed that being around people who blame others encouraged the subjects to blame others in turn. 

One of the study’s authors, Nathaniel Fast, noted,

“The ‘germ’ that spreads is the goal of protecting one’s self-image.  When people observe others protecting their egos, it spreads.”

The ego is one of the biggest causes of dysfunction in organizations.  When people perceive that their position or status is threatened, they react defensively. And this defensiveness can lead to finger-pointing instead of assumption of responsibility.

Fast observed that people who blame others for their shortfalls learn less and perform worse than peers who own their mistakes.   If they won’t own the problem, they won\’t own the solution and won\’t learn from the experience. The individuals, as well as the company, suffer in a blame culture.

However, the study also determined that employees who have a strong sense of self-worth and self-esteem were able to avoid the “germs” of blame contagion .  Environments where employees are supported and encouraged, even when they make honest mistakes or take unsuccessful yet thoughtful risks, ward off the blame culture.

The Impact of Blame on Company Culture

Just as children fear mom and dad’s punishment if they admit to wrongdoing, in a blaming environment, employees are afraid of criticism and repercussions if they acknowledge making a mistake at work.  

Ramifications may include public humiliation, loss of status and responsibilities—or even poor performance reports and fewer raises. Staff members are then afraid to take risks and try new approaches in the event they are unsuccessful.

Blame cultures, according to Oxford Review , have:

• Higher levels of turnover
• Reduced work engagement and productivity
• Decision escalation, or continually referring to managers for decisions
• Lower levels of organizational performance
• Lower levels of innovation behaviors and creativity
• Reduced levels of job satisfaction
• Reduced levels of responsibility-taking

How Blame Affects Innovation

Innovation is stifled when employees are afraid to try something different.  After all, why challenge the status quo or propose new ideas if you are punished when you fail?

In 2018 Gallup interviewed business managers and employees about their experiences with agility at their company.  Less than a quarter of US employees strongly agreed with the statement, “My company creates an environment where people can try, fail, and learn from mistakes.”

As Gallup Research Analyst Marco Nink noted, “If three-quarters of your workforce doesn’t feel free to innovate, becoming truly agile is impossible.”

By definition, innovation requires trial and error.  Employees need a safe environment that not only encourages intelligent risk-taking but also allows room for failures.  Leaders should find ways to celebrate not only the risks that succeeded but those that failed despite thoughtful execution.

How to Eliminate Blame Culture

Leadership and management author Louis Carter outlines five ways to stop a blame culture:

• Spread awareness about the physiological effects of blame and excuses.

People who refuse to take responsibility for their actions and blame others play the victim and increase their stress levels.  Blame leads to negativity and feelings of powerlessness, pessimism, and anger.

• Stop blaming yourself and others.

Blaming and making excuses are habits, which need to be broken like any other negative behavior.  Check your ego at the door, and work on bolstering your self-esteem.

• Define the “why” as much as the “what.”

Work with your team to eliminate the habitual blaming and create a plan for a culture of accountability . Drive home the disadvantages to both the employee and the organization when problems are faced with finger-pointing. Highlight the benefits of a culture which focuses on learning from mistakes and problems.

• Follow up to ensure accountability.

Create a culture of responsibility where each person is personally accountable and holds others responsible. Check with employees to see whether they are noticing less blaming and more accountability in the workplace.

• Look at yourself.

Change needs to start at the leadership level.  Ensure you are exhibiting the proper behaviors of responsibility and accountability. Then, model the behavior you want to see.

Accountability and Responsibility

As a leader, you must step up when a problem or crisis has occurred .  Your team is watching.  They will take their cues from how you respond.  As former Campbell Soup CEO and leadership author Doug Conant notes ,

“The best thing you can be is somebody who chooses to take responsibility. Own the issue, hold yourself and others accountable, make a plan to fix it, execute that plan, and move on.”

Conant further notes that taking responsibility as a leader doesn’t mean you don\’t hold people accountable.  You do.  But instead of spreading blame, he encourages fostering accountability. 

When you step up as a leader to own the problem, you will encourage others to work together to resolve the immediate issue and make the necessary process corrections to ensure the same thing doesn’t happen again.  

Blameless Problem-Solving

At CultureWise , we refer to this approach as “blameless problem-solving.” It is part of a set of employee behaviors that define our company culture. 

Practicing blameless problem-solving is to:

Demonstrate a relentless solution focus, rather than pointing fingers or dwelling on problems. Identify lessons learned and use those lessons to improve ourselves and our processes so we don’t make the same mistake twice. Get smarter with every mistake. Learn from every experience.

CultureWise CEO and author David Friedman explained this Fundamental in his first book, Fundamentally Different :

“When we practice blameless problem solving, we’re first and foremost focused on solutions. A problem has occurred. The most important steps we can take immediately are to understand the various aspects of the issue, determine what options exist to solve it, choose the best course of action, and get moving on implementing the solution. Notice what’s conspicuously absent in this list. Blame.”

While it’s critical to understand what went wrong when a problem occurs, look at it from the perspective of what process broke down rather than what person dropped the ball.  That expands the opportunity for creativity and process improvement.

Spending time looking for someone to blame, or even worse, figuring out how to keep yourself out of the line of fire, takes valuable time away from this process reengineering opportunity.

Need Help Eliminating the Blame Culture?

A blaming environment robs organizations of innovation, employee engagement, and productivity.  If you find that your company culture permits finger-pointing to go unchecked and that managers punish employees who make mistakes, it’s time for a culture re-set. 

CultureWise can help you define and operationalize the culture you want to see in 4 simple steps:

• Define the behaviors (we call them “Fundamentals”) that drive success in your organization.
• Create and deploy the rituals necessary to teach and practice those behaviors with consistency.
• Engage your workforce for maximum impact.
• Serve daily high-quality teaching content to your team with a powerful mobile app.

CultureWise provides:

• Access to a library of the best Fundamentals culled from our experience, already written for you, and guidance on choosing the ones that fit your company.
• Expert advice on how to create the most appropriate rituals for your organization, based on industry and type of workforce.
• Step-by-step guidance on how to roll the program out effectively to get your team’s full and enthusiastic engagement.
• Access to a massive library of teaching content for every Fundamental, including hundreds of daily QuickTips, teaching points, coaching tips, questions for discussion, videos, and scenario-based lessons.
• Simple, user-friendly tutorials to guide you every step of the way.
• Complete reporting on every aspect of employee engagement in the program.
• Unlimited phone support from highly trained Implementation Specialists.

Visit our website for more information about plans and pricing, and take a test drive of our mobile app .

Enjoy a complimentary subscription to the CultureWise blog, Culture Matters , for the latest insights and news about corporate culture.

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Jewish Federation of Cincinnati

Danielle V. Minson — Raising the Bar

Fundamental #5: Practice Blameless Problem-Solving

I feel great when members of our staff mention insights or skills they’ve gained that work that help them outside work, in the rest of their life.

Well, if your family is anything like mine, this week’s fundamental can improve life at home as well as in the office.  

When things don’t go as we expect or desire, the easiest thing is to figure out who’s to blame.  But blaming creates conflict and destroys trust. And it steals energy from actually solving the problem. When we are blaming, we aren’t learning all the lessons the situation offers. 

When Avi started here, he was (and is) very impressed with our team culture, especially our dedication, creativity, and sense of community. But he also noticed that there is a fear of failing that inhibits experimentation. This is common in organizations. However, the startup world has taught us that long-term success in complex and changing environments (like ours) requires experimenting. And some experiments fail. An organization’s strength is determined not by whether if fails but by how much it learns from its failures.

Blame-free investigation often reveals that a failure is caused less by any single person’s mistake and more from unclear roles and expectations.

If we can brainstorm with some colleagues about what we can learn from a failure, we will discover new approaches and new opportunities. 

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Practice Blameless Problem Solving

Demonstrate a relentless solution focus, rather than pointing fingers or dwelling on problems. Identify lessons learned and use those lessons to improve ourselves and our processes so we don’t make the same mistake twice. Get smarter with every mistake and learn from every experience.

Avoid the Blame Game

JW Way Fundamental #22: Practice Blameless Problem Solving  “Blame has no place in our firm. Fix errors by focusing on solutions, not assessing blame. Learn from mistakes and use that knowledge to improve our processes. Mistakes are a critical component of learning.” 

I believe maturity, both intellectual and emotional, is key to successfully practicing blameless problem solving. But let’s begin with a simple, immature “blame game” example that’s common in my household. My wife and I have four children and a dog. This means numerous messes and breakages with exponential occurrences of non-accountability. For every mess or breakage, there are at least four denials! The non-accountability usually comes in the form of an absolute denial “It wasn’t me” or glad-to-speculate snitching “That was probably [fill in sibling/dog name here]”. In our usual blame game, my wife or I set out with the fervor of a medieval inquisition to find the wrongdoer and impose punishment. For the record, on the rare occasions I’m accused, undeservedly of course, I blame whomever is not around or can’t talk: “Damn dog, left that empty plate and glass on the coffee table again.” The blame game here is immature because the leaders are not as interested in solutions as they are in assigning blame and punishment, and the kids are not as interested in solutions as they are in self-preservation.

Probably most of us have had similar experiences growing up, and it’s no wonder that when things go wrong, even as adults, a core reflex is to find “someone” or “something” to blame and focus on the negative consequences and self-preservation. It takes a certain kind of maturity and professionalism to overcome that reflex and rise to a higher level of problem solving. How do we routinely rise to that higher level? Many business experts agree that there are four fundamental steps to mature/professional problem solving, none of which involve blame and punishment:

• Identify and define the problem;
• Generate alternative solutions;
• Analyze and select the best of the alternative solutions; and,
• Implement and follow up on the chosen solution.

Each of these steps incorporate and interrelate with several other JW Way Fundamentals. We must act with integrity and leave our egos at the door to best identify and define the problem, particularly if the problem lies within ourselves. We must listen fully and communicate to be understood for each step to be successful. At every step, we must demonstrate respect and not be jerks. Perhaps most important, we must recognize that blameless problem solving is an opportunity for continuous improvement and embracing change to avoid or minimize the problem in the future.

Mistakes will occur. Maturely and professionally responding to and improving from those mistakes is the JW Way!

Mark D. Bogard is a partner at Jaburg Wilk where his practice focuses on construction law. He represents contractors and material suppliers, with an emphasis in construction contract drafting/revising, construction payment rights and remedies including mechanics’/materialmen’s liens and payment bonds and construction litigation

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I have been a resident at Celamonte, Chino Hills since 2016 and I have always been happy with the property management by Crummack Huseby. Yes, I know there are tons of negative reviews here. There were a couple of times that I felt the same way when I first moved here. But, now I understand the way their enforcement is necessary to maintain our community beautifully maintained the way it always has been. And our property managers do try to work together with the residents very hard to assist and they know exactly what they are doing every time. Especially, our assistant manager Kiele is among the best. She is always prompt with her responses, gives great advice, is very experienced and resourceful, and handles all situations quickly with professionalism. She has never failed to extend her sincere effort in helping and resolving every little issue I had. I am so glad that we have such a great property management company to manage our property and I thank Kiele once again for the amazing support.

Cherry S. Chino Hills Celamonte Customer since 2016

Blameless Problem Solving

July 16, 2019    Courtney Chastain, CCAM, Director of Community Management    Education , Manager Musings

CH PRINCIPLE #13: Blameless Problem Solving Takes Practice

It’s our instinct, when faced with a problem, to quickly wonder HOW it could happen? Even if you had all the best preventive measures in place or perhaps you even safeguarded a situation so that nothing would go wrong…things can still go wrong.

So when things go wrong or a problem arises, try your best to not point a finger or dwelling on the HOW of the problem. Yes, of course, we want to know HOW so that we don’t make the same mistake twice, or so that we can learn from our experience. But if you practice being blameless and practice seeking the solution first, you’ll see a positive shift in how you and your team can handle a problem smarter, better, and faster.

The property management industry is a job for problem solvers. Crummack Huseby has made a solid reputation out of being incredible problem solvers with budgets, HOA issues, and even spearheading change with laws to help get clarity for homeowners in conjunction with the CAI-OC. Crummack Huseby is consistently tasked with solving problems for our clients, homeowners, as well and internal office opportunities. It's easy to get caught up looking back and asking the question of "why something occurred" but this question should be secondary. The first one to ask is “how can this be solved?” Yet even that requires 7 easy steps to consider.

• Identify the issue at hand
• Understand everyone's interest
• List possible solutions
• Evaluate options
• Select an option or options
• Document the agreements (so important in the community management industry!)
• Agree on contingencies, monitoring, and evaluation

Steps 6 and 7 are the ones I find invaluable in my job at Crummack Huseby. Solving problems in a way that is insightful focuses on moving forward. It gives your problem-solving momentum and also helps you and your team to put your heads into more strategic thinking by documenting solutions and possibly putting more accountability on yourself and others.  

ABOUT COURTNEY CHASTAIN, CCAM, DIRECTOR OF COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT 

Courtney Chastain has a passion for properties and became a licensed realtor after college. She quickly became a multi-talented asset for Century 21, initiating and managing their Property Management Division. Wanting to expand her community management influence after six years, she joined Crummack Huseby Property Management, Inc. in 2012. “I love solving complex problems and finding solutions that benefit the community.”

As Crummack Huseby’s Director of Community Management, Courtney has been a game-changer for numerous homeowner's association throughout Orange and Riverside counties. Her ability to identify health, safety and liability concerns, plus address the most efficient and effective ways to minimize association risk is invaluable to the communities she manages. She is a true partner for homeowners in her involvement with association boards and community relations, including the financial and physical aspects of running large community projects.

ABOUT CRUMMACK HUSEBY PROPERTY MANAGEMENT INC.

Orange County, California, based Crummack Huseby Property Management, Inc., manages many diverse HOA’s and master-planned communities in Southern California. They have added value to communities by working with HOAs, homebuilders, and land developers through their collaborative and customized approach. Crummack Huseby’s personalized philosophy to community management has allowed them to successfully discover and develop one-of-a-kind programs for new and existing communities.  They offer professional business planning, governance, community management, financial only management, planning, and forecasting services for community associations. They also have been recognized as  one of the Best Places to Work by the Orange County Business Journal in 2015, 2016 and 2017 . Founders Sandy Huseby and Margo Crummack each have more than 30 years of experience in  Common Interest Development (CDI) management .  Crummack Huseby Property Management obtained an AAMC® Accreditation  status which highlights their focus and commitment to deliver total customer satisfaction.  If you would like to learn more about Crummack Huseby Property Management Inc., they look forward to learning about your community and understanding your needs and how they can best support your community. For more information -  Start a Conversation , email  [email protected] , or call 949-367-9431.

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Creating a culture of blameless problem-solving

• People and leadership skills
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Finance is complex, and whenever you have complication and uncertainty, it is a given that things will go wrong at some point. When they do, the best way to deal with those mistakes is to use them to learn and grow. And the only way an organisation can be aware of issues while they’re still small-scale is to create an environment in which employees and managers at all levels feel safe voicing their concerns and thoughts.

“The reality is human beings will make mistakes,” said Amy C. Edmondson, Novartis professor of leadership and management at Harvard Business School and author of The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth . “When we’re in novel settings, beyond just mistakes, we’ll also have failures that aren’t, strictly speaking, mistakes because no one’s ever been in that situation before. The most important thing is that you hear about what went wrong in a timely way because that’s how you can jump on it and avoid larger-scale problems.”

Companies that foster a culture of blameless problem-solving have the potential to learn from what goes wrong, and also to innovate, through smart experimentation, while companies that habitually blame individuals are in danger of running into large-scale disasters without a hint of impending doom, according to Edmondson.

Here are some tips for creating a workplace environment in which people feel they can speak up about what’s happening and collectively work hard to improve and avoid big problems:

Promote smart experimentation. Experimentation is how companies innovate and develop tomorrow’s new offerings, but you want to make sure that the experimentation strategy is a smart one. Organisations should never experiment on a grand scale in uncertain domains. Experiments need to be big enough to get valid data about their viability, but not so big that the potential failure will be devastating to the business.

“For organisations to create a culture that doesn’t blame or punish mistakes, they must embrace entrepreneurship culture,” said Ebrima Sawaneh, a Lagos-based accountant and finance blogger. “Every employee should be trained and empowered to innovate solutions without fear of being punished if they make genuine mistakes. Employees should be encouraged to report any mistake, and organisations have to clearly set what is acceptable and create a line of sight.”

Once you have a clear experiment strategy of an appropriate scale, you must make sure that everyone’s expectations are aligned.

“Everyone (high and low) must know that this is an experiment, and the nature of an experiment is we don’t yet know what will happen,” Edmondson said. “Make sure everyone is aware of the fact that this may or may not work, and in both cases, what happens will provide great data.”

Invite input. Leaders need to make it clear to people that their voice is not only expected but also welcomed.

“A lot of times, especially when they are nervous that there might be layoffs, people have the tendency to hold back,” Edmondson said. “There’s an implicit belief that no one ever got fired for silence. I think the job of leaders is to flip that around. In the complex, uncertain industry in which we operate, the people that we’re not hearing from are not of much value.”

Because the tendency for employees is to remain silent about issues, leaders need to be proactive in inviting input. It’s one thing to say, “I’d love to hear from all of you,” but it’s another to turn to a specific employee and ask, “What do you think of this situation? I’d love your thoughts.”

“After painting the situation we find ourselves in in such a way that it becomes clear that voice is necessary, leaders must be proactive in asking ‘What are you seeing out there? Is there anything not going well? What are you excited about?’” Edmondson said.

Foster psychological safety. In her latest book, Edmondson discusses why it matters for company performance that people feel psychologically safe to speak up and what leaders can do to help bring it about.

“I don’t mean to say we have to get rid of all fear,” Edmondson said. “I think it’s fine to be afraid of missing a deadline or afraid of the competition. It’s not fine to be afraid of one another or the boss.”

Edmondson explained that while managers have an outsized influence on the climate at work, any employee can make a more psychologically safe space for colleagues simply by showing up with a spirit of openness, asking questions, and truly listening.

“When you listen thoughtfully to a colleague or a subordinate, you are making a difference. You are making work life that much more safe and enriching,” she said. “In addition to asking questions, when you say things to colleagues, subordinates, or managers such as ‘I made a mistake’ or ‘That didn’t work out the way I thought,’ it sets a shining example of a learning orientation. If you model a learning orientation and interest in others, you will make that small difference, in your vicinity, in helping create a learning organisation.”

Sawaneh agrees that fostering psychological safety can help create a high-performing financial organisation.

“When people fear that they will be blamed for mistakes, it can affect their active participation and sometimes result in their being too careful,” he said. “The key resource of accounting firms are their people, and when individuals are less concerned about mistakes, they will be willing to delegate, create a learning culture, become team players, and embrace change.”

Avoid stretched goals and closed ears. While there are several examples of organisations doing a good job of creating a culture of blameless problem-solving, there are also examples of companies that have faced the consequences of squelching safe and open communication.

Wells Fargo’s recent failure , in which millions of accounts were created without consumers’ consent, is one such example. According to Edmondson, the bank’s initial cross-selling strategy wasn’t fully in touch with the reality of customers’ limited wallets, which created immense pressure to have more and more products per customer, leading employees to activities that became fraudulent and problematic in other ways. Had employees felt able to speak up, push back, and say what they were learning, the strategy might have been tweaked.

“A recipe for failure is stretch goals and closed ears,” Edmondson said. “When managers, getting the messages from on high, are saying, ‘You better deliver on this,’ the implied rest of that sentence is, or else . People will deliver, at least on the illusion of creating the desired results, so then what you will often see is the illusion of good performance rather than good performance itself.”

Develop a productive response to bad news. Psychological safety in the workplace can be shattered the second a boss erupts in anger over a reported failure.

“Leaders need to train themselves not to overreact emotionally to bad news,” Edmondson said. “They need to pause, breathe, and disrupt what might be the natural, instantaneous reaction of emotion or disapproval, and say, ‘Thank you for that clear line of sight. Now what should we do next? What are your ideas? Here are my ideas.’ It’s what I call a productive response to bad news, as opposed to a natural, in many ways normal, response to bad news.”

Hannah Pitstick is a freelance writer based in the US. To comment on this article or to suggest an idea for another article, contact Drew Adamek, an FM magazine senior editor, at [email protected] .

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Video 8: Practice Blameless Problem-Solving

Apply your creativity, spirit, and enthusiasm to developing solutions, rather than pointing fingers and dwelling on problems. identify lessons learned and use those lessons to improve our processes so we don’t make the same mistake again. create win-win solutions..

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Practice blameless problem-solving

Demonstrate a relentless solution focus, rather than pointing fingers or dwelling on problems. Identify lessons learned and use those lessons to improve ourselves and our processes so we don’t make the same mistake twice. Get smarter with every mistake. Learn from every experience.