Halloween Is Over, But the Witch Hunt Continues
The pumpkins are gone, and witch costumes are packed away until next year, but in tech companies, the "witch hunt" continues with undiminished enthusiasm. Only now, without the candy and festive mood. 🎃
After reading recent discussions in professional communities about why witch hunts persist in corporate cultures, I decided to dive deeper into this phenomenon that plagues modern organizations.
When Does the Hunt Begin?
The hunt typically starts when things go wrong: a failed release, an unhappy client, a team under stress, yet another change in requirements, and general chaos ensues.
In my experience consulting with technology companies, only a few organizations in such situations take the time to reflect on the root causes of failures and work together to improve processes and communication. This approach requires a high level of self-awareness and a mature corporate culture.
It's much easier to find a scapegoat. First, it's faster and requires less effort. Second, it provides a quick defense mechanism for stakeholders - here's the situation, we found the culprit, they've been punished, problem solved. Right?
Anatomy of a Modern Witch Hunt
Let me share a recent case from a tech company I worked with.
After a series of unsuccessful releases, the system crashed, requiring a rollback. The team spent the entire next sprint on bug fixing. Customers were sending angry feedback, investors were losing money, and the product manager was torn between the team, clients, and stakeholders, trying to manage the crisis. Then the classic hunting scenario began.
On the surface, everything looked "professional":
"Post-mortem Meeting": A three-hour meeting with stakeholders where every team action was scrutinized under a microscope. The question "who's to blame?" was never explicitly asked, but everyone understood that's exactly what was happening. Not a word about "how do we improve to prevent this?"
Public Shaming: During the team call, the tech lead detailed the previous meeting's results and pointed out the QA engineer's mistakes, supposedly for "team learning." In reality, it was public humiliation.
Upward Escalation: The issue was elevated to top management, specifically framed as "QA missed the bugs," creating an atmosphere of fear and distrust within the team.
Preventive Measures: Additional tests and approvals were implemented, and a new QA engineer was added to the team, which only slowed down work and demoralized the team further.
The result? The QA engineer who had intimate knowledge of the system and had been with the project for almost two years left, team productivity and development quality dropped even more, and the real process problems remained unsolved.
Why Do We Keep Hunting?
1. The Engineering Paradox
In an industry built on logic, we somehow believe in a magical solution – find and eliminate the "problematic" employee.
What's fascinating is that engineers who understand complex systems have multiple failure points and cascade effects don't have a single cause – engineers who meticulously analyze every system failure – don't extrapolate this thinking to organizational context. Instead, they believe in simple solutions to complex organizational problems.
It's like trying to find a single faulty server in a distributed system crash while ignoring the complexity of system interactions.
2. The Quick Fix Illusion
Here's another paradox: in an industry where we constantly talk about technical debt and the cost of quick fixes, we somehow believe in quick wins when dealing with people and processes. The logic seems compelling:
* Find the culprit → punish them → problem solved
* Add more oversight → increase control → prevent mistakes
* Implement new process → patch the hole → sleep peacefully
I've observed these patterns across numerous companies, and as a coach, I often demonstrate the absurdity of such solutions without a comprehensive approach to problem-solving.
3. Fear and Control
Behind witch hunts often lies deep management fears:
* Fear of losing control over the situation
* Fear of acknowledging their own management mistakes
* Fear of stakeholders and having to explain systemic problems
I recently spoke with a leader of the team where a new stakeholder began personally checking every team step, severely demotivating the team and reducing effectiveness. The team is still hanging on, but the unspoken message that "We can no longer create products and work comfortably; we can only fear making mistakes" permeates the atmosphere.
4. Organizational Immaturity
Witch hunts often indicate organizational culture immaturity. Values might be beautifully written on office walls in gold letters, but in reality, there's a lack of systematic problem analysis practices, no understanding of human error nature, and an inability to effectively deal with uncertainty.
How can we identify that the problem lies in culture? Look for repeating patterns: teams or managers change, but the disappointing results remain the same.
Ignoring work at this level only exacerbates the situation – culture doesn't change by itself.
5. Organizational Defense Mechanisms
Organizations, like living organisms, develop defense mechanisms that typically surface during crises. Witch hunts are one of the most primitive but persistent mechanisms.
Sound familiar? "It's not our processes that are bad; it's the people who work poorly" – that's projection. "We're just maintaining high quality standards" – that's rationalization. And of course, there's denial – "We don't have systemic problems, just individual employees who can't cope."
The Cost of the Hunt
Every game has a price, and organizations pay heavily for playing the witch hunt game.
Short-term losses might include decreased team productivity, increased errors due to fear, loss of experienced employees, and general deterioration of team atmosphere. Unpleasant, but not fatal.
The long-term consequences are far worse: development of a toxic culture, difficulty hiring competent and experienced people, loss of innovation potential, and the entrenchment of dysfunctional management patterns as standard practice. These issues can take years to fix – if they can be fixed at all.
How to Break the Cycle
I believe the first crucial step is recognizing that witch hunts exist in your organization and are a regular occurrence.
From there, we can work at a systemic level to understand the triggers that initiate this mechanism and evaluate the real cost of such "solutions."
The second step involves working with the system, primarily creating a safe space, stopping hunts at their inception, encouraging open discussion of mistakes, shifting focus to systemic processes rather than people, and fostering open communication and transparency.
The third step is developing systems thinking, where Agile practices can be particularly helpful – teaching leaders to work with complex problems, implementing regular reflection practices, and developing a culture of continuous improvement and openness.
Transforming a "witch hunt" culture into a learning and development culture is a marathon, not a sprint. It requires consistent work with leaders and teams, and patience and persistence in maintaining changes.
Unfortunately, in these situations, Agile coaches often become the "witches" themselves, making their task doubly challenging – they must avoid being burned at the stake while helping the organization improve. Sadly, sometimes even the metaphorical death of a coach on the stake teaches the organization nothing.
As one of my clients said: "It took us a year to stop looking for someone to blame and start looking for solutions. But these investments paid off a hundredfold – now we have a team that's not afraid to experiment and openly discuss problems."
Witch Hunting Could be Finished
Let's return to our Halloween metaphor. Unlike the holiday that ends the next day, organizational witch hunts can continue for years, becoming part of corporate DNA. But this story can have a different ending. Yes, it's a slow process. Yes, it requires courage from leaders and patience from teams. But the results are worth the effort.
P.S. Perhaps it's time to leave witch hunts and inquisitions in the past, along with other medieval practices? In today's world, success is built on trust, not fear; on development, not control; on learning, not punishment.
