The Blame Game

“The buck stops here!”¹ “The saying "the buck stops here" derives from the slang expression "pass the buck" which means passing the responsibility on to someone else. The latter expression is said to have originated with the game of poker, in which a marker or counter, frequently in frontier days a knife with a buckhorn handle, was used to indicate the person whose turn it was to deal. If the player did not wish to deal he could pass the responsibility by passing the "buck," as the counter came to be called, to the next player.”²

I do not know how many people know that phrase anymore. It was made famous by Harry S. Truman, the thirty third president of the United States. President Truman was famous for taking responsibility for all the decisions that crossed his desk when he was in the White House. It seems that now a days, many people don’t know of that magical phrase or maybe they just choose to ignore it.

Why do you think that is? Have you ever been faced with a decision you’ve made totally blowing up? And if you have, was your first reaction to find someone or something to blame? If you are like most people you probably have. Does that make you a bad person, not necessarily but it all depends on the whys behind your need to play the blame game and how big a deal your bad decision was.

Let me give you some examples of the whys (more can be found here³):

1. You are embarrassed by the way your decision blew up, so you need to find a scapegoat so as to avoid that embarrassment from becoming realized. This allows you to seemingly save face, but does it really? That’s a rhetorical question.
2. You don’t want to take responsibility for a bad decision, so it is easier to blame someone or something else.
3. You feel threatened so a good defense is to blame someone or something for the bad decision.

The above three examples are fairly simple, but I hope they give you enough context to understand people’s reasoning (aka whys) for playing the game.

Now I do not want to turn this into a political article, but there have been many recent examples of our (United States) senior leadership blaming each other for things that are not going according to plan. Additionally, I can point to the Brexit debates that have been going on in the UK Parliament; if you haven’t watched any of these you should. Lastly, there have been other less dubious country leaders who are more than happy to blame others, sometimes whole nationalities or religions for their bad decisions.

Not to be left out of the fun are businesses, and this is where I will remain for the rest of this blog. While the Coegil Application can help anyone make better decisions, I need to focus on areas where I have some experience. Businesses exist, by and large, to deliver goods and/or services in return for remuneration. That’s a big word but all it means is the businesses want to get paid. For a business to be successful, it needs to have people who make great decisions. This is not a one off process but something that needs to be repeatable and the decision makers need to learn from their past decisions, both good and bad. 

Today there appears to be a huge gap with this learning process. It seems to me anyway, that companies don’t learn from their (or others’) bad decisions. Instead, companies will blame something for their bad decisions and not benefit from understanding why they made a bad decision.

You would think it would be better for them to stop playing the blame game⁴ and get on with better decision making. Harvard Business Review has an article⁵ that discusses how to stop so I won’t go into that here. Once a company stops playing the game, how can they truly learn from their bad decisions?

This is where Coegil comes in. With the Coegil Application, companies would have the ability to go back to the information used by their decision makers to make a decision. They could then pinpoint what information was wrong:

• Was the original hypothesis (aka Project) off base?
• Were the Insights incorrect? If so, were the people who provided those insights the right people to work with?
• Were the Assets used (data, research papers, other sources) relevant and/or accurate?
• Were the actions the right ones to take?
• Were the predictions sensible?

As you can imagine, the more a company uses the application, the more data they accumulate to help them in their decision-making process. Additionally, the more they use the application the more they learn to make better decisions. 

1 - https://www.trumanlibrary.org/buckstop.htm

2 - Mitford M. Mathews, ed., A Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1951), I, pages 198-199.

3 – https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201509/5-reasons-we-play-the-blame-game

4 – https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/what-would-aristotle-do/201207/stop-playing-the-blame-game

5 – https://hbr.org/2010/05/how-to-stop-the-blame-game