I work in the area of incident response and I’ve noticed that when issues occur, we all tend to point fingers. Blaming one another for incidents and outages perpetuates the “blame and shame” culture which not only has an affect on our teams, but the organization as a whole. Its a natural response to point fingers at others, it absolves us from blame and frees us from stressful situations. But there are serious consequences to perpetuating a blame and shame culture. For one, human error is never the root cause of a incident. Incidents are the results of systematic vulnerabilities in the organization or team. On top of that, when we point fingers, we don’t bring ourselves any closer to diagnosing the root cause or preventing the issue from reoccurring . Our typical responses, removing humans and automating what we can, won’t always save us from mistakes; we have to find better ways to respond.