From Noise to Clarity | Track 15
Blame the Person #26
Thinking Traps | Post 26 of 35. (How we work together)
Before you read: think of someone at work whose performance has frustrated you. How much do you know about what they’re working with?
The regional manager of a bakery chain had a problem store. Sales were down, waste was up and customer reviews mentioned empty shelves by lunchtime. In her quarterly review, she summed up the situation in one sentence. “The store manager just doesn’t have the drive.”
The decision followed naturally. The store manager was moved to a smaller shop, and one of the chain’s rising stars was sent in to turn things round. She was energetic, organised and well liked. Everyone expected results within a few months.
Six months later, the numbers were almost exactly the same. Sales were still down, waste was still up and the shelves were still empty by lunchtime.
It was only then that someone looked at the store itself rather than the person running it. The ovens were older than anywhere else in the region and could bake only half a batch at a time. The delivery of flour arrived after the morning rush, not before. A large office nearby had closed during the year, taking much of the lunchtime trade with it. Two capable managers had been blamed, one after the other, for a situation neither could have fixed alone.
That’s the trap of blaming the person. When something goes wrong, we look for the person responsible and explain the problem through their character, while the situation around them stays out of sight.
People are easy to see. Situations are not. When we judge someone without drawing the conditions they’re working in, we often blame the person for the system, and then wonder why replacing them changes nothing. The way out is to draw the system around a person before you judge them.
Why we blame people rather than situations
When we watch someone else struggle, their behaviour is the part of the picture we can see clearly. We see what they did or didn’t do. We don’t see the outdated equipment, the unclear instructions, the conflicting priorities or the workload that arrived on their desk that morning. So we explain the result by the thing we can see: the person.
Psychologists call this the fundamental attribution error: our tendency to explain other people’s behaviour by their character, while explaining our own behaviour by our circumstances. When we miss a deadline, it’s because the brief changed. When a colleague misses one, it’s because they’re disorganised.
“People are easy to see. Situations are not.”
Organisations make the trap easier to fall into. Performance reviews are built around individuals. Accountability is assigned to named people. When a problem appears, the first question is often who is responsible, and once that question has an answer, it can feel as though the problem has been explained.
There’s also comfort in it. If the problem is one person, the solution is simple and contained: coach them, move them or replace them. If the problem is the system, the solution is harder and touches everyone, including the people doing the judging.
This post is close to the trap of one cause, many problems, earlier in the track, but it has a particular shape. There, the problem was settling on a single cause of any kind. Here, the cause we settle on is a person, and the cost of being wrong falls on someone’s career and confidence.
How do you know you’re blaming the person?
Try this: Think of someone at work whose performance you’ve been frustrated by, and list five things in their situation that you haven’t looked at closely.
If that list was hard to write, you’ve found the first tell. When you can describe someone’s flaws easily but struggle to describe their working conditions, you’re seeing the person and not the situation.
The second tell is a problem that survives a change of people. When a role, team or store has the same problems no matter who is in charge, the problem is very probably built into the situation.
The third tell is the language of character. Listen for words like lazy, careless, lacks drive or not a team player. They describe a person, and they rarely tell you anything about what that person is up against.
A client of mine, a newly appointed team leader at a payroll bureau, came to me frustrated with one member of her team. He made more errors than anyone else, she said, and didn’t seem to care. She was preparing for a difficult performance conversation.
Before the conversation, I asked her to draw him in the middle of a page and then draw a ring of boxes around him for everything in his working situation. She drew his workload, his software, his training, the people he worked with, his hours and his desk.
Two boxes stood out once they were on the paper. His desk sat next to the phone that clients called with urgent queries, so he was interrupted constantly. And he worked on the bureau’s large and complex client accounts, which nobody had thought to compare with the simpler accounts his colleagues handled. When his desk was moved and the complex accounts were shared more evenly, his error rate fell to the team average within a month. The difficult conversation never needed to happen.
“The difficult conversation never needed to happen.”
The sketch that springs the trap: draw the ring
I call the escape sketch draw the ring. It places the person inside their situation, so you can see them both at once.
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Draw a stick figure in the middle of a page for the person you’re judging. It might be a colleague, a team member, a supplier or even yourself. Around the figure, draw a large circle.
On the circle, draw a small box for each part of their working situation. Start with six. Their tools and equipment. Their workload. The instructions and information they receive. The people they depend on. Their time. Their physical space. Write a word or two in each box about what that part of their situation is really like.
Draw a short line from the figure to each box, as a reminder that each one is pushing on the person in the middle.
Then look at the ring before you look at the person. Which box would make the job difficult for anyone? Circle that one.
Picture the bakery’s regional manager drawing the ring before her first decision. The equipment box would have held the old ovens. The supplies box would have held the late flour delivery. The customers box would have held the office that closed. The store manager in the middle would have looked very different surrounded by those boxes, and two careers would have been spared a difficult year.
Only after the ring is drawn should you ask what the person themselves might do differently. Sometimes the answer really is about the person: a skill they need, a habit to change, a conversation to have. But now you’re asking that question with their situation in full view, and the conversation that follows is fairer and far more useful.
As a visual strategist, I find this a particularly kind sketch. It doesn’t excuse anyone. It simply asks us to look at the conditions someone is working in before deciding what kind of person they are. Many managers tell me it has changed the tone of their performance conversations, because they arrive curious rather than certain.
It’s also worth drawing the ring around yourself when you feel you’re failing at something. The boxes that appear can be a relief, and they often point to changes you can ask for. People who are thinking about leaving a role often conclude they aren’t good enough for it, when the ring would show a manager who has changed, a team that has shrunk or a workload that has doubled. Sometimes the right move is a new job. Sometimes it’s a conversation about one box.
What happens when a team draws the ring
I once anonymously observed a case at an organisation where the principal of a music school was concerned about one of her piano teachers. Enrolments in his classes had fallen steadily for two terms, and several parents had moved their children to other teachers. The principal had begun to wonder whether his teaching had slipped.
Before speaking to him, she drew the ring. His teaching room. His timetable. The students he had been given. The materials he used. The parents. The other activities competing for the same children.
The timetable box stopped her. At the start of the year, his classes had been moved to late afternoons to make room for a new group programme. Those late slots clashed with a popular sports club that many of his students attended. His teaching hadn’t changed. His time slot had.
She moved two of his classes back to earlier in the afternoon. Within a term, his enrolments had recovered, and several of the families who had left came back to him.
“His teaching hadn’t changed. His time slot had.”
A note on the book that shapes this series
This track draws on The S.T.A.R. System: Applying Visual Thinking for Career & Business Success, which I co authored with Sherrie Low. Sherrie and I describe Application as the stage where people put decisions into practice together.
Blaming the person is a trap that turns a shared Application into one person’s failure. When the situation goes unexamined, the same problems return no matter who is in the role. Draw the ring puts the whole system on the page, so the Application can change the conditions people work in, not just the people.
Your trap card
The trap: explaining a problem by someone’s character while their situation stays out of sight.
The tell: their flaws are easy to list, the problem survives a change of people, and the language is about character.
The sketch: draw the ring. Put the person in the middle, draw their situation in boxes around them, and look at the boxes first.
People do matter, and some problems really are about skill or effort. The trap is reaching that conclusion before you’ve looked at what the person is working with. A stick figure and a ring of boxes are enough to make sure you see both.
Who in your organisation might be carrying the blame for a situation, and what would their ring show?
Next in Thinking Traps: More Slides, Less Clarity, the trap of mistaking complexity for rigour, and a sketch built on one page, one picture and one decision.
This idea comes from The S.T.A.R. System: Applying Visual Thinking for Career & Business Success, co authored by Ai Yat Goh and Sherrie Low, published by Marshall Cavendish Business. If seeing people inside their situations is useful to you, the book goes further into applying visual thinking across career and business decisions. Get it on Amazon.
Ai Yat Goh is a Visual Thinking Strategist, educator and entrepreneur based in Singapore, and Asia’s first Master Trainer for Dan Roam’s Power of Visual Series. She works with professionals, teams and organisations navigating a pivot, helping people see clearly before they act. Connect on LinkedIn or read more on Medium.
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BK HAN Candy Chan RH Malini Lawrence Lee Jessica Leong Angela Toh PUN Kai Loon
