How do they convince people not to use failures as political capital against other teams? It's all well and good to say "We promise we won't do it!", it's quite another to actually not call out the other team's failures when they're competing with you for budget/headcount, or against other individuals when stack-ranking.

You do it by management not making things zero sum, and by correcting/penalizing people for blaming behavior (e.g. saying a root cause is that a team/person made a mistake, vs a system not preventing or mitigating the mistake)

Ideally by not creating systems where people within the same organization view each other as (more than friendly) competitors, and by weeding out the sociopaths who can’t help but view life through that lens.

That's a good read.

Blame is such a complicated thing and the results of any mess are always way complicated even without the human factor.

I'm not convinced in any complex system outside of a guy running through a datacenter with a hammer... that anyone can actually "properly" assign blame or fault.

Humans are going to dork up, but no point in coming down on someone(s) for all the complexity that leads to a problem..... helping everyone avoid it on the other hand has a lot of benefit.