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Business Bartleby
商业版块，巴托比专栏
Faulty Reasoning
错误推理
Why pointing fingers is unhelpful and why bosses do it more than anyone
为什么指责于事无补，为什么老板乐此不疲
Casting blame is natural: it is tempting to fault someone else for a snafu rather than taking responsibility yourself.
责怪他人是很自然的：把混乱局面归咎于别人，而不是自己承担责任，这种做法极具诱惑力。
But blame is also corrosive.
但指责也具有破坏性。
Pointing fingers saps team cohesion.
相互指责会削弱团队凝聚力。
It makes it less likely that people will own up to mistakes, and thus less likely that organisations can learn from them.
这使得人们不太可能承认错误，因此组织也不太可能从错误中吸取教训。
Research published in 2015 suggests that a Shaggy culture (“It wasn’t me”) shows up in share prices.
2015年发表的一项研究表明，甩锅文化(“不是我干的”)会反映在股价上。
Firms whose managers pointed to external factors to explain their failings underperformed companies that blamed themselves.
有些公司的经理用外部因素来解释业绩不佳，这些公司的表现逊于那些责怪自己的公司。
Some industries have long recognised the drawbacks of fault-finding.
一些行业很早就意识到了挑错的弊端。
The proud record of aviation in reducing accidents partly reflects no-blame processes for investigating crashes and close calls.
航空业在减少事故方面取得骄人成绩，这在一定程度上反映了调查坠机和侥幸脱险事故时不问责的做法。
The National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates accidents in America, is explicit that its role is not to assign blame or liability but to find out what went wrong and to issue recommendations to avoid a repeat.
负责调查事故的美国国家运输安全委员会明确表示，它的职责不是把责任归咎于某一方，而是找出哪里出了问题，并提出建议，避免重蹈覆辙。
There are similar lessons from health care.
医疗保健方面也有类似的教训。
When things go wrong in medical settings, the systems by which patients are compensated vary between countries.
当出现医疗问题时，赔偿患者的制度因国家而异。
Some, like Britain, depend on a process of litigation in which fault must be found.
有些国家，比如英国，依赖必须找出过错的诉讼过程。
Others, like Sweden, do not require blame to be allocated and compensate patients if the harm suffered is deemed “avoidable”.
其他国家，如瑞典，不要求把责任归给某一方，如果所遭受的伤害被认为是“可以避免的”，那么就对患者进行赔偿。
A report published by a British parliamentary committee last year strongly recommended moving away from a system based on proving clinical negligence:
英国议会的一个委员会去年发布了一份报告，强烈建议放弃基于证明临床疏忽的制度：
“It is grossly expensive, adversarial and promotes individual blame instead of collective learning.”
“这种制度代价高昂，具有对抗性，鼓励个人指责，而不是集体学习。”
The incentives to learn from errors are particularly strong in aviation and health care, where safety is paramount and lives are at risk.
从错误中吸取教训的动机在航空和医疗保健领域尤为强烈，在这些领域，安全至上，生死攸关。
But they also exist when the stakes are lower.
但当风险较低时，这种动机也会存在。
That is why software engineers and developers routinely conduct “blameless postmortems” to investigate, say, what went wrong if a website crashes or a server goes down.
这就是软件工程师和开发人员经常进行“免责事后调查”的原因，比如，如果网站崩溃或服务器宕机，问题出在哪里。
There is an obvious worry about embracing blamelessness.
人们对免责存在明显的担忧。
What if the wretched website keeps crashing and the same person is at fault?
如果这个倒霉网站不断崩溃，而且是同一个人一直出错，该怎么办？
Sometimes, after all, blame is deserved.
毕竟，有时责备是理所应当的。
The idea of the “just culture”, a framework developed in the 1990s by James Reason, a psychologist, addresses the concern that the incompetent and the malevolent will be let off the hook.
20世纪90年代，心理学家詹姆斯·瑞森提出了“公正文化”的理论，解决了人们对无能和恶意者逃脱惩罚的担忧。
The line that Britain’s aviation regulator draws between honest errors and the other sort is a good starting-point.
英国航空监管机构在诚实错误和其他错误之间划出的界限是一个很好的起点。
It promises a culture in which people “are not punished for actions, omissions or decisions taken by them that are commensurate with their experience and training”.
它承诺建立一种文化，在这种文化中，人们“不会因为与他们的资历和所受培训相符合的行动、疏忽或决定而受到惩罚”。
That narrows room for blame but does not remove it entirely.
这缩小了指责的空间，但并没有完全消除它。
There are two bigger problems with trying to move away from the tendency to blame.
要想摆脱指责的倾向有两个更大的问题。
The first is that it requires a lot of effort.
首先，这需要付出很大的努力。
Blame is cheap and fast: “It was Nigel” takes one second to say and has the ring of truth.
指责不费力也不费时间：“是奈杰尔的错”只需要一秒钟就能说出来，而且听起来很有道理。
Documenting mistakes and making sure processes change as a result require much more structure.
记录错误并确保流程因此发生变化则需要更多的组织安排。
Blameless postmortems have long been part of the culture at Google, for instance, which has templates, reviews and discussion groups for them.
例如，免责事后调查长期以来一直是谷歌文化的一部分，谷歌有进行免责事后调查的模板、述评和讨论小组。
The second problem is the boss.
第二个问题是老板。
People with power are particularly prone to point fingers.
有权力的人特别容易指责他人。
A recent paper by academics at the University of California, San Diego, and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore found that people who are in positions of authority are more likely to assume that others have choices and to blame them for failures.
加州大学圣地亚哥分校和新加坡南洋理工大学的学者最近发表的一篇论文发现，处于权威地位的人更有可能认为其他人有选择余地，并将失败归咎于他们。
In one experiment, for example, people were randomly assigned the roles of supervisor and worker, and shown a transcript of an audio recording that contained errors;
例如，在一项实验中，参与者被随机分配了主管和员工的角色，并给他们一段包含错误的录音文字记录；
they were also shown an apology from the transcriber, saying that an unstable internet connection had meant they could not complete the task properly.
他们还看到了抄写员的致歉，称不稳定的网络意味着他们无法正常完成任务。
The person in the supervisor role was much more likely to agree that the transcriber was to blame for the errors and to want to withhold payment.
主管角色的人更有可能同意抄写员应为错误负责，并希望扣留付款。
Power and punitiveness went together.
权力和惩罚性相伴而生。
Blame also seems to be contagious.
指责似乎也有传染性。
In a paper from 2009, researchers asked volunteers to read news articles about a political failure and then to write about a failure of their own.
在2009年的一篇论文中，研究人员让志愿者阅读有关政治失败的新闻文章，然后写下他们自己的一次失败经历。
Participants who read that the politician blamed special interests for the screw-up were more likely to pin their own failures on others;
那些读到这位政客将失败归咎于特殊利益集团的参与者更有可能将自己的失败归咎于他人；
those who read that the politician accepted responsibility were more likely to shoulder the blame for their shortfall.
而读到这位政客接受责任的参与者则更有可能为自己的不足承担责任。
Bosses are the most visible people in a firm; when they point fingers, others will, too.
老板是公司中最醒目的人；当他们指责他人时，其他人也会效仿。
If your company has a blame culture, the fault lies there.
如果你的公司有指责文化，那么问题就出在这里。
