The Difference Between Justice and Wisdom
The question of "whose fault is this?" is not enough.
Welcome to the Shepard Scale, where we explore and test applied counterintelligence doctrine for leaders in contested or adversarial conditions. Today we are exploring something that will be familiar to just about anyone who’s ever spent time in an organization: the post-incident scramble to find someone to blame.
In any organization, failure will happen eventually. There will be a betrayal, or an infiltration, or someone will make a wrong choice that is costly on levels impossible to foresee beforehand.
The first question is always “Who is responsible?” Whose fault is this? Those are important questions, and they need to be asked. People need to answer for their actions, and if they screw up, they have to own that choice and its consequences.
That’s only half of the operation, however, and it’s reactive. The act is done; you can’t go back in the past and change it. Removing the person who committed the act is a good thing to do in some cases (and depending on the situation, it might be the very best thing you can do), but it still won’t change the outcome you’re dealing with. More importantly, it won’t give you the framework to prevent it from happening again.
This is where we have to separate the concept of justice from the concept of wisdom. Justice fixes responsibility on the actor. The orientation audit examines the model you were running at the time the outcome happened.1 These are separate operations on separate variables; the first assigns responsibility, and the second protects your future exposure.
Outcomes Are Orientation Data
Your orientation is the running model that governs how you read a situation and what you decide to do about it. John Boyd put it at the center of the decision cycle for a reason.2 Orientation shapes what you notice, what you discount, and which options look available to you. Action follows from that. Outcomes follow from your actions. Then the outcome feeds back into the model (or at least, it should).
A hostile outcome may be a signal that your model missed something. The existence of a bad outcome does not prove that your orientation was wrong, but it gives you sufficient cause to test it. Today, we’re going to show you what that test looks like and why you need it.
The Higher the Stakes, the Less You Can Afford to Stop at Blame
When you conclude the event wasn’t your fault or you’ve identified whose responsibility the incident is, the examination usually stops. You’ve answered the justice question, and it feels finished. The orientation that produced your exposure survives unexamined, ready to produce the same exposure again. You’ve protected your innocence in terms of the incident, but kept your vulnerability.
The audit is a separate operation, and it doesn’t touch the actor’s responsibility. It runs on your model. That distinction is the whole discipline. You can be blameless in one aspect of the situation, blameless in the incident and the outcome, and still bear responsibility for the beliefs and behaviors that got you up to that moment.
Higher Stakes Mean a More Valuable Audit
Let’s say that a daycare worker is found to be abusing the children in their care. Justice says, “This person is at fault for their choices and they must be removed.” That is true and appropriate. It also, however, does nothing for preventing another predator from getting hired.
If the daycare were to do a proper autopsy on the matter, they would uncover the the gaps, beliefs, assumptions, and behaviors that created or preserved the employee’s access to the opportunity. It might look something like this:
Process Gaps: only one person does background checks and she was on vacation so it was set aside just this once so the applicant could get hired. Additionally, they normally don’t allow an employee to be alone with any child, but everyone was outside and one child needed to go to the bathroom. Because of them being short-handed, the new employee was told to take the child to the bathroom.
Beliefs: It’s just this one time. This new employee is safe; I really like them. It’ll be fine.
Behaviors: Making exceptions to the documented processes. Engaging in emotional trust behaviors and substituting it for the structural variety. Assuming that gut instinct is a good enough basis for trust.
The outcome was that a child was harmed, and yet the daycare stopped their investigation once they answered the two justice questions: What happened, and who is responsible for it? By ending their investigation at justice and not engaging the wisdom process, they have left the vulnerability wide open for another incident, and left the children in their care at the mercy of their next predator employee.
That’s a structural trust failure. Process over personality is a component of structural trust, and it was suspended for a man people liked and therefore trusted.
This happens in all sorts of group and relationship types. Another example is a company where justice says the employee stole proprietary information. He’s fired, the company does some damage control, and then they move on.
You’ll notice something about that damage control. It’s geared toward controlling the impact of the current incident, not preventing another one. This happens often in corporate world; you’ll see a mad scramble to mitigate fallout, maybe a cursory nod to “our process,” but no real substantial change. They are focused on fixing the consequences rather than fixing the situation that allowed the consequences to even occur.
The orientation audit, the seeking of wisdom, asks how one employee could download the entire customer database to a personal device without triggering an alert. It examines access controls, assumptions about trusted staff, approval processes, and monitoring. The goal here isn’t to also assign blame to the company, because the responsibility for that theft belongs solely in the lap of the employee who committed the act. The company, however, can only control certain variables going forward, and they need to close to the gaps before it happens again.
After an aircraft accident, investigators identify pilot mistakes, but they keep investigating. They examine cockpit design, training, fatigue, communication procedures, maintenance schedules, weather reporting, and organizational culture on top of many other things. You cannot stop once responsibility is assigned, because justice and wisdom require two separate investigations and question sets.
These ideas are not some new concept; in fact, Chris Argyris was writing about “double loop learning” back in 1977.3 As he explains, single loop learning seeks to correct surface behavior. Double loop is when you also examine the underlying variables that governed the situation. Another way of looking at this is the pursuit of justice and wisdom.
What You Do With It
When something goes wrong, by all means ask who is responsible. Ask what repercussions need to happen, what actions you need to take in response.
Also ask how it happened. How did you get there? What conditions existed?
What did we go into this situation believing, that ended up not being true?
What factors went into the situation that we didn’t see at the time?
What did we see but choose to ignore or rationalize?
What exceptions did we allow?
What personalities or relationships affected our decisions or caused bias?
What could we have done upstream that would have prevented this cascade from occurring at all by not making an environment conducive to the act that caused the outcome?
Pay attention to the shift there. The goal is to establish an understanding of the conditions that caused the outcome in question. That means looking at facets instead of people. When you’re done, you have a specific understanding about who did what, why it was done, where the gaps were, what needs to get fixed, and what your failure points are.
If you stop after accountability for the act or incident, you will miss all of that critical data, which means you can’t act on it, which means you can’t fix it…which means that incident, or one like it, will occur again.
For a real-world example of a company that chose not to pursue justice OR learning, you can check out my analysis of the statement made by Astronomer in the wake of the viral scandal featuring two of their leaders at a Coldplay concert.
Remember: Justice looks backward to render a verdict; wisdom looks forward to reduce continued exposure.
Don’t let the assignment of responsibility terminate the learning process.4 You need both if you don’t want the situation to repeat.
Reason, J. (2000). Human error: Models and management. BMJ, 320(7237), 768–770. While Reason was writing specifically about human error and organizational accidents, the premise he is operating from holds across domains.
Boyd, J. R. (1987). A discourse on winning and losing (briefing). Reprinted in G. T. Hammond (Ed.), The Essential Boyd (2001). Air University Press. Also see MacCuish, Donald A. 2012. “Orientation: Key to the OODA Loop—The Culture Factor.” Journal of Defense Resources Management 3(2): 67–74.
Argyris, C. (1977). Double loop learning in organizations. Harvard Business Review, 55(5), 115–125.
Dekker, S. (2017). Just Culture: Restoring Trust and Accountability in Your Organization (3rd ed.). CRC Press. Dekker also pointed out that swinging too far to the other end is also problematic. If you treat accountability as incompatible with learning, you won’t have real accountability OR learning.
This is one of the reasons why, in Six Sigma, they refuse to accept "user error" as an answer.
Powerful closing sis. System assessment and improvement crucial to really executing justice when errors occur. Great stuff