For the conversations I have in mind, I did bring that up.
In response they pointed to “the clear evidence of failure” (their sense of it at least). I replied that I had warned them about the possibility of that outcome—and by itself that wasn’t enough.
With this particular set of managers, my working style conflicted with their managing style: I would offer them options and warn them about potential issues. They would go for the fastest to implement option, and treat “potential” issues as very unlikely. When something did go wrong, they would no longer remember our original constraints, or my original warning. In these cases what they wanted from me was a guilty “mea culpa”. Which I thought was pointless—regardless of who was at fault. I told them that. Instead, I would talk to them about how we could make better decisions in the future. They were looking for emotion and I gave them logic. They took this as me not accepting responsibility.
Part of what we did wrong was that we did not document the decision making process. A year later when issues began, nobody had a clear memory of the original context for that decision. We also did not have any process for considering risk. These deficiencies made it difficult to improve our process over time.
For the conversations I have in mind, I did bring that up.
In response they pointed to “the clear evidence of failure” (their sense of it at least). I replied that I had warned them about the possibility of that outcome—and by itself that wasn’t enough.
With this particular set of managers, my working style conflicted with their managing style: I would offer them options and warn them about potential issues. They would go for the fastest to implement option, and treat “potential” issues as very unlikely. When something did go wrong, they would no longer remember our original constraints, or my original warning. In these cases what they wanted from me was a guilty “mea culpa”. Which I thought was pointless—regardless of who was at fault. I told them that. Instead, I would talk to them about how we could make better decisions in the future. They were looking for emotion and I gave them logic. They took this as me not accepting responsibility.
Part of what we did wrong was that we did not document the decision making process. A year later when issues began, nobody had a clear memory of the original context for that decision. We also did not have any process for considering risk. These deficiencies made it difficult to improve our process over time.