Ending the Blame Culture

by Michael Pearn, Chris Mulrooney

This book is about mistakes and what we can learn from them. It faces up to, and explains how organizations can escape from ’blame cultures’, where fearful conformance and risk avoidance lead to stagnation, to ’gain cultures’ which tolerate and even encourage mistakes in the pursuit of innovation, change and improvement. Ending the Blame Culture was written as a result of systematic analysis of the content of over 200 accounts of real mistakes within businesses and organizations. This analysis provides both insight and understanding into the type of mistakes made, the context they were made in and how they helped learning and development. As a result the authors are able to distinguish between intelligent and undesirable those which should be tolerated and those which must be avoided. The result is a book which gives sound advice on how individuals learn, practical measures that organizations can adopt to enhance learning through better management of mistakes, and the promotion of a culture which supports and fosters experimentation and risk taking.

236 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1998

About the author

Michael Pearn is a Chartered Occupational Psychologist based in Dublin. He is a Fellow of The British Psychological Society, the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development, and the RSA. He is a graduate in Psychology and Philosophy, Dublin University and holds a PhD in Psychology from London University. He was a founding partner of Pearn Kandola in 1984 until retiring from the practice in 1999. Recent books authored include Learning Organisations in Practice (1995); Ending the Blame Culture (1998); Empowering Team Learning (1998) and The Manager’s Book of Numbers (2002). He is currently a Director of the Centre for Leadership Learning in Dublin, a Director of Learn2improve Ltd, a Visiting Research Fellow at Lancaster University, and a Member of the Associated Faculty, Swedish Institute of Management, Stockholm.