Compassion, not blame.

We blame people when they make mistakes; when their decisions go wrong, when they gamble. But are people blameworthy?

We do not possess an accurate causal model of the system in which we act. We do not have enough information to make sense of the world we live in to be able to make the best decisions every time. We wouldn’t know how our decisions pan out. When we make decisions we are, in some sense, gambling. And when we gamble, we are taking a risk on the outcome not knowing what hand we are playing against.

Despite good intent, outcomes are unpredictable; even in our workplaces.

We simplify the world in our effort to make sense of it. We reduce the variables involved to try and understand what is happening. In order to understand the movement of the price of oil, for example, we could look at it as simply a function of supply and demand. This probably is enough to understand the causal structure of the oil price mechanism for most of us in our daily lives. Turn on the switch, circuit completes and the lamp comes on - this might be enough for most of us to understand what causes the lamp to come on. But the world isn’t as simple. There is more to oil price than supply and demand. There is more to power generation and distribution than turning a light bulb on.We use heuristics.

Heuristics helps us make sense of most things; we form our beliefs based on these.?But it may be dangerous to represent complex systems in simple causal structures if we are working in or with such systems. Such representations could lead to consequences. In order to make sense of the complexity, we will need more information; more variables. But adding more variables slows down an algorithm working to understand the system it is part of. Similarly, the human brain that needs more information to make better sense of the causal structure of the system will be cognitively stretched while reasoning to make sense of it.

Learning the causal structure of real-world systems is very hard. The causal complexity of real-world structures is not easy to decipher. There are complex interdependencies that play out. This complexity remains hidden until a decision by an actor in the system triggers unanticipated interdependencies resulting in unanticipated outcomes: near misses and incidents. ?

When there are such extreme complexities, can any action by a well-intentioned human actor be blameworthy? When people can never have an accurate causal model of the system in which they act, is it right then to blame them for a decision? Will that help?

Instead, if we were compassionate to our colleagues who make a mistake, maybe we can have a conversation that shows us what is otherwise hidden: the context the organisation is creating. And maybe the next time, they make a mistake, they might talk to us openly about it.

David Kinney in this article where he makes a mathematical case against blaming, says:

“The limits of our ability to infer the complex causal structure of the social world lead directly to the conclusion that blame isn’t appropriate. No matter how smart we think we are, there’s a hard limit on what we can know, and we could easily end up on the losing end of a big bet. We owe it to ourselves, and others, to build a more compassionate world.”