I recently interviewed a specialist in safety psychology who has worked with over 300 major companies and he saw ‘fundamental attribution error’ ( I’ll call it FAE from now on ) as central to his work. FAE is where we over-emphasise the role of individual personality in what happens ( whether a disaster or a success ) and under-emphasise the environment, processes, systems and all the other factors that can contribute. Thus, if there’s  major accident  it must be Fred or Susan’s fault ( rather than a culture which emphasised speed, terrible components or any of the other things that can cause disaster).

There’s a slightly more subtle version of this which concerns our self-attribution: how we explain failure or success when we rather than someone else is involved. Many people will ascribe success to their own brilliance and blame failure on the tools they’re asked to work with, other people, the system and processes ( sales people meeting or missing targets tend to switch between these two positions ).

It struck me that a lot of the debate about the financial melt-down is being carried out in these terms: there’s a disaster so it must be ‘those people’s’ fault, while ‘those people’ are pointing out some other factors had a role to play. At its worst this results in an extremely unhelpful stand-off between personal abuse and a sense that none of us have any effect on complex markets and organisations. The demonisation of senior banking staff perversely strengthens the ‘hero’ model of leadership: ‘these people’ are so powerful that when they get it wrong the world trembles. The ‘hero’ model of leadership is as much influenced by society at large as any other piece of social theorising: it’s an 80s model and is long past its sell-by date though recent debates about party leadership in the election lead up are depressingly carried out in  its language.

I’d be the last person to underplay personal factors in life. The five factor model is particularly robust in explaining why things happen. Norman Buckley’s post on self-deception raises a point I’ve often observed ( Introvert / Emotionals  often get overlooked in their often taken-up role as internal consultants, but can temper the over enthusiasms of other personality types ). But you can over-explain situations - and get them wrong - relying just on personality explanations. They’re intrinsically attractive: more so than, say, ability descriptions ( ‘ This person simply has too little reasoning ability to do the job’) or the onerous, uncomfortable business of trying to change a major product, a whole system or the way a workforce is managed.

But, because of this, there is a danger that personality talk gets separated out from its real work and organisational context and is over-relied on. Recent research shows that modern personality tests are increasingly practical tools in organisations. But there’s a real task to connect their results up to other sorts of organisational and social analysis. This suggests that the old consultancy divide between individual development and organisational development needs junking. They’re two aspects of the same thing.