Finger Pointing: Why Blame is Rarely Important
Accountability matters. Just not at the cost of getting things done.
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We live in a society that is full of problems. Even the best countries are rife with violence, unfairness and callousness. Having so many problems isn’t necessarily the issue though.
We’ll always find more issues that need to be fixed even if we fix most of the issues that currently plague us. Even as things get better people will latch onto what is wrong rather than what is right. This is something worth looking into, but it isn’t the subject of this article.
What I’m trying to address here is that we have many problems but we spend surprisingly little time and effort fixing them. We instead often choose to focus on who’s to blame for those problems.
We’re much more interested in pointing fingers than fixing those problems. We’re fantastic at casting blame and pushing responsibility onto others. Our blame can be pointed at who we believe caused it or we can point our fingers at the people we think should be fixing the problem. As long as it isn’t our fault it isn’t our job to fix it.
Don’t get me wrong, many of our issues are deeply complicated and there aren’t simple fixes. The average person simply isn’t going to be able to come up with good solutions. Of course, the average person also doesn’t have the resources to fix these problems either.
The other problem is that the people who do have the resources to fix these problems have a tendency to try to point fingers at others as well. This is at least partially our fault as a society.
We’re far to happy to throw a politician, celebrity or whomever under the bus. We have started trying to destroy careers when people make mistakes or aren’t doing what we perceive to be enough. It’s no wonder that when the finger gets pointed at people they focus on getting those fingers pointed elsewhere instead of trying to fix the problem.
We demand action but our own behavior and actions actually stall it. I learned plenty of things while I was a manager at a restaurant but one of the big ones is that figuring out who caused a problem is almost never as important as simply solving it.
