I’m fed up with the blame game – so much energy spent on trying to figure out who’s at fault, who’s responsible. It’s rife from domestic arguments to national disasters; it’s institutionalised by Royal Commissions and official inquiries, and it’s used to rationalise the inexplicable.

Blaming is part of the ‘What happened?’ Conversation. In their book Difficult Conversations, Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton and Sheila Heen describe the ‘What happened?’ Conversation as the place “where we spend much of our time in difficult conversations as we struggle with our different stories about who’s right, who meant what, and who’s to blame. On each of these three fronts – truth, intentions and blame – we make a common but crippling assumption.”

They provide the following summary of these three elements of the ‘What happened?’ Conversation.

The Truth Assumption: I am right, you are wrong.

The Intention Invention: We assume we know the intention of others when we don’t. Worse still, if we are unsure of someone’s intentions, we too often decide they are bad.

The Blame Frame: Talking about fault is similar to talking about truth – it produces disagreement, denial, and little learning. It evokes fears of punishment and insists on an either/or answer.

That’s bad enough. Even worse when ill-informed people attribute blame for natural disasters. So I’m reproducing here a post from Tales From the Hood, a blog focusing on “rants, raves, and confessions, and a few tall tales about humanitarian aid work.”

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