Mistakes Were Made: The Art of Dodging Accountability

In 1977, a man in San Francisco crashed his car into a telephone pole. When the police arrived, he gave his account of the incident. The telephone pole, he explained, had been approaching him. He had attempted to swerve out of the way, but the pole struck his front end.(1)

It sounds absurd. It is absurd. And yet every one of us has done some version of this. We have all, at one time or another, rearranged the facts of a situation so that the blame lands somewhere other than on us.

This is a consistent pattern of human behavior: when something goes well, we use the active voice. I closed the deal. We hit our numbers. The team delivered. When something goes badly, the perspective shifts to the passive voice. Mistakes were made. Costs increased. The project fell behind schedule.

This is the essence of the often abused phrase: “Mistakes were made.” The late William Safire called it the “past exonerative tense.” The journalist Bill Schneider described the logic behind it this way: mistakes were made, but not by me, by someone else, someone who shall remain nameless.(2)

Notice the construction. Not “I made mistakes.” Not “We failed.” Mistakes were made. By whom? The sentence does not say. It refuses to say. That is precisely the point. The passive voice becomes a shield. It acknowledges that something went wrong while carefully ensuring that the speaker remains untouched by it.

Politicians love it. But so does everyone else, including corporations, who have perfected the art of avoiding blame.

A “mistake” becomes a “complication.” An accident becomes a “one-off.” Layoffs become “strategic asset realignments.” A nuclear accident becomes an “unrequested fission surplus”—as Mr. Burns famously put it on The Simpsons.(3) A hospital where an error killed a patient will describe it as an “unanticipated outcome.”

This is not just semantics. It is a system of self-protection that gets more sophisticated the higher you go. Sydney Finkelstein studied why smart executives fail and found that error denial increases as you go up the pecking order. The people with the most power and the most responsibility become the most creative at explaining away their failures.

Here is the irony nobody talks about. Leaders use passive blame because they think it protects them. It does the opposite.

Stanford professor Bob Sutton makes the point directly: when leaders blame external forces exclusively for their troubles, they do not project strength. They project powerlessness. People begin asking a question that should terrify any executive: if you did not have the power to cause this, how can we trust you to have the power to fix it?

When leaders don’t own a failure, it signals that nothing was learned. And when nothing is learned, nothing changes. The same errors repeat. People begin to notice.

Here is the part that should matter to anyone running a team: passive blame might protect you from accountability, but it destroys your credibility and your ability to lead.

Passive blame is contagious. When the boss will not own mistakes, no one else will either. The organization becomes a game of blame deflection, with every person focused on making sure fingers are pointed elsewhere when the music stops. People stop taking risks. They stop raising problems. As Seth Godin has observed, people are not afraid of failure—they are afraid of blame.

The alternative is not complicated. It is just difficult.

Jocko Willink, the Navy SEAL commander, reduced it to two words: extreme ownership. On any team, all responsibility for success and failure rests with the leader. There is no one else to blame. The leader must acknowledge mistakes, take ownership, and develop a plan to win.

Dave Cooper, another Navy commander, put it even more simply: “I screwed that up” are the most important words any leader can say.

This is not martyrdom. This is strategy. When you say “I screwed that up,” you accomplish several things at once. You disarm your critics, because they were prepared to attack and now have nothing to attack. You earn trust, because people respect honesty far more than perfection. And you unlock the ability to act, because the moment you own a problem, you have permission to solve it.

That is a message of strength, not weakness.

Ask your team what stops them from accomplishing their goals. As Bernard Roth advises in The Achievement Habit, the answers are almost always external—parents, spouses, bosses, the system. They sound legitimate. But when you dig down, it is almost always the person themselves who is in the way.

Here is a question, borrowed from Cy Wakeman, to ask in your next meeting, “What would great look like right now?”

It is a simple question, but it demands that everyone in the room stop looking for someone to blame and start looking for something to build. It shifts the conversation from the past exonerative to the present imperative.

1. Idea from the book Deceit and Self-Deception by Robert Trivers

2. Idea from the book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) by Eliot Aronson/Carol Tavris

3. Idea from the book Thank You for Arguing by Jay Heinrichs