> Like blameless postmortems taken to a comical extreme where one person is always doing some careless that causes problems and we all have to brainstorm a way to pretend that the system failed, not the person who continues to cause us problems.

Well, I'd argue the system failed in that the bad person is not removed. The root is then bad hiring decision and bad management of problematic people. You can do a blameless postmortem guiding a change in policy which ends in some people getting fired.

> There’s a toxic idea built into this statement: It implies that the real root cause is external to the people and therefore the solution must be a systemic change.

Not necessarily, although certainly people sometimes fall into that trap. When dealing with a system you need to fix the system. Ejecting a single problematic person doesn't fix the underlying problem - how did that person get in the door in the first place? If they weren't problematic when they arrived, does that mean there were corrosive elements in the environment that led to the change?

When a person who is a cog within a larger machine fails that is more or less by definition also an instance of the system failing.

Of course individual intent is also important. If Joe dropped the production database intentionally then in addition to asking "how the hell did someone like him end up in this role in the first place" you will also want to eject him from the organization (or at least from that role). But focusing on individual intent is going to cloud the process and the systemic fix is much more important than any individual one.

There's also a (meta) systemic angle to the above. Not everyone involved in carrying out the process will be equally mature, objective, and deliberate (by which I mean that unfortunately any organization is likely to contain at least a few fairly toxic people). If people jump to conclusions or go on a witch hunt that can constitute a serious systemic dysfunction in and of itself. Rigidly adhering to a blameless procedure is a way to guard against that while still working towards the necessary systemic changes.

> There’s a toxic idea built into this statement: It implies that the real root cause is external to the people and therefore the solution must be a systemic change.

It's both obviously. To address the human cause, you have to call out the issues and put at risk the person's career by damaging their reputation. That's what this article is doing. You can't fix a person, but you can address their bad behavior in this way by creating consequences for the bad things.

Part of the root cause definitely is the friction aspect. The system is designed to make the bad thing easier, and when designing a system you need the good outcomes to be lower friction.

> This hits a nerve for me because I’ve seen this specific mindset used to avoid removing obviously problematic people, instead always searching for a “root cause” that required us all to ignore the obvious human choices at the center of the problem.

The real conversations like that take place in places where there's no recordings, or anything left in writing. Don't assume they aren't taking place, or that they go how you think they go.

> Like blameless postmortems taken to a comical extreme where one person is always doing some careless that causes problem

Post-mortems are a terrible place for handling HR issues. I'd much rather they be kept focused on processes and technical details, and human problem be kept private.

Dogpiling in public is an absolutely awful thing to encourage, especially as it turns from removing a problematic individual to looking for whoever the scapegoat is this time.

People don’t really understand what this stuff means and create fucked up processes.

In a blame focused postmortem you say “Johnny fucked up” and close it.

When you are about accountability, the responsible parties are known or discovered if unknown and are responsible for prevention/response/repair/etc. The corrective action can incorporate and number of things, including getting rid of Johnny.

This hits the nail on the head. I liken it to a scale or ladder, each rung representing a new level of understanding:

1) Basic morality (good vs evil) with total agency ascribed to the individual

2) Basic systems (good vs bad), with total agency ascribed to the system and people treated as perfectly rational machines (where most of the comments here seem to sit)

3) Blended system and morality, or "Systemic Morality": agency can be system-based or individual-based, and morality can be good or bad. This is the single largest rung, because there's a lot to digest here, and it's where a lot of folks get stuck on one ("you can't blame people for making rational decisions in a bad system") or the other ("you can't fault systems designed by fallible humans"). It's why there's a lot of "that's just the way things are" useless attitudes at present, because folks don't want to climb higher than this rung lest they risk becoming accountable for their decisions to themselves and others.

4) "Comprehensive Morality": an action is net good or bad because of the system and the human. A good human in a bad system is more likely to make bad choices via adherence to systemic rules, just as a bad human in a good system is likely to find and exploit weaknesses in said system for personal gain. You cannot ascribe blame to one or the other, but rather acknowledge both separately and together. Think "Good Place" logic, with all of its caveats (good people in bad systems overwhelmingly make things worse by acting in good faith towards bad outcomes) and strengths (predictability of the masses at scale).

5) "Historical Morality": a system or person is net good or bad because of repeated patterns of behaviors within the limitations (incentives/disincentives) of the environment. A person who routinely exploits the good faith of others and the existing incentive structure of a system purely for personal enrichment is a bad person; a system that repeatedly and deliberately incentivizes the exploitation of its members to drive negative outcomes is a bad system. Individual acts or outcomes are less important than patterns of behavior and results. Humans struggle with this one because we live moment-to-moment, and we ultimately dread being held to account for past actions we can no longer change or undo. Yet it's because of that degree of accountability - that you can and will be held to account for past harms, even in problematic systems - that we have the rule of law, and civilization as a result.

Like a lot of the commenters here, I sat squarely in the third rung for years before realizing that I wasn't actually smart, but instead incredibly ignorant and entitled by refusing to truly evaluate root causes of systemic or personal issues and address them accordingly. It's not enough to merely identify a given cause and call it a day, you have to do something to change or address it to reduce the future likelihood of negative behaviors and outcomes; it's how I can rationalize not necessarily faulting a homeless person in a system that fails to address underlying causes of homelessness and people incentivized not to show empathy or compassion towards them, but also rationalize vilifying the wealthy classes who, despite having infinite access to wealth and knowledge, willfully and repeatedly choose to harm others instead of improving things.

Villainy and Heroism can be useful labels that don't necessarily simplify or ignorantly abstract the greater picture, and I'd like to think any critically-thinking human can understand when someone is using those terms from the first rung of the ladder versus the top rung.