It’s You. You’re the Scapegoat.

Stories shall be told.

Dear readers: It’s been a little quiet at Ars Pandemomium the last two weeks. Due to an unforeseen medical emergency, I’ve fallen rather behind on the editorial calendar. But! I look to be on the mend now, and hopefully back to it next week. In the meantime, here’s an older post, from before I had subscriptions enabled. You may have already seen it (it’s been posted to the site since March), but if not, take a look! Thanks for reading!

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Any time someone leaves a team, a new story is about to be told. It’s okay, that’s what happens! But as team members we should be aware that it's about to happen, and as managers it’s critical we’re conscious of and intentional about it (except we’re human and we won’t be). But it’s worth trying!

Every team maintains a history, a kind of ongoing self-narrative.

This narrative is the team’s generally accepted Story of the Way Things Happened™ that helps explain and explicate The Way Things Are™. 

In a healthy organization this story is mostly factual, and largely true (truth and fact not necessarily needing to be synonymous in such situations). The storytelling happens unconsciously and unintentionally — and sometimes very consciously and very intentionally, too — through anecdotes of course, but also unique processes, group posts, email threads, even conference room names and project codes, team swag and office decorations.

Let me be clear, I do not think this is a bad thing…not that it’s avoidable anyway. We create narratives, it’s just what we do.

This narrative is one critical part of what’s often called “team culture.” And as with other elements of team culture, the Story of the Way Things Happened™ is a valuable tool to get new team members up to speed, to cultivate a sense of esprit de corps, and to normalize healthy behavior and disincentivize undesirable behavior. 

Assessing The Way Things Are™ at any given moment is a little like seeing the light from a distant galaxy; it is an act of peering into the past.

The current state of the team is simply the cumulative result of countless past decisions and circumstances. Maybe they were good decisions. Maybe they were bad. Maybe they were made in circumstances which no longer apply. Maybe they were just compromises — all decisions are compromises! — that made as much sense as any other at the time. Maybe the participants are still on the team. And maybe they’re not.

And that’s the most critical feature of this Story™. It is told by…the team.

We don’t likely have much of a role in telling it before we’re on the team, and we certainly have no role in telling it after we’ve left. 

Okay, so let’s say you have just left a team, for whatever reason. Maybe you quit the company, maybe you got transferred to a different project, maybe you were promoted to a different kind of work. You’ve tied the bow on your current work as well as you could, and you’re out.

Whatever you did to tie that bow — the documentation, briefings, assignments, etc. — that was it. That was your last contribution to the Story of the Way Things Happened™ that explains The Way Things Are™. And from here on out, the folks on the team own the narrative. 

And any time we’re in this kind of situation — even when we’re approaching it thoughtfully and intentionally — certain key work is probably still underway; unless the team is totally moribund, it’s at work on something! Even a top performer getting promoted can find themselves being asked to essentially leave behind a legacy sponsorship of a project or an initiative, perilous as that might be. There’s rarely a “right time to leave.”

Having been both the leaver and the left, I can say this is a fraught enterprise. That’s true for a few reasons — some quite reasonable, some pretty pernicious — and I’ll get to those.

But first, I want to establish baseline definitions for a couple of words that are going to be important here: scapegoat and retcon. Since you probably already know what they mean, you can guess where I’m going with this. But bear with me, because I think there’s some important nuance worth exploring. Here we go.

Scapegoat is a truly ancient metaphor, certainly as old as the Bible (since it’s described there), likely even older. In any event, the word refers to an ancient rite involving a literal goat onto which, in a ritualistic ceremony, the transgressions of the community would be symbolically placed. Then the goat would be sent to wander away into the wilderness, thereby cleansing the community. ¹

Anyway, the word ends up in English after the usual rounds of dubious translations as “the goat that escapes” and, eventually, “scapegoat.” 

In modern idiomatic usage we know that a scapegoat is someone who is blamed for the misdeeds or negative circumstances of others — either completely without justification, or at least out of proportion to their real responsibility. And the word is a verb, too: to scapegoat someone is to use them, well, as a scapegoat.

Admittedly, this all might be a little pedantic, but it’s important! Look, communities have been trying to figure out how to package up their problems and send them away for at least six thousand years. So it’s probably behavior that’s just to be expected. Notwithstanding that it has mutated into a non-ritualistic, possibly sociopathological dysfunction, it is ingrained pretty deeply! 

We should assume scapegoating will happen.

Retcon is a much newer word, a portmanteau formed from the phrase retroactive continuity. It’s a literary(-ish) way to describe a piece of fiction that changes facts or interpretations from an earlier piece of fiction to suit a new set of circumstances. It’s often used in comic books and sci-fi where this kind of thing happens all the time (e.g. in Star Wars, Obi Wan tells Luke that Darth Vader killed his father. Then in Empire Strikes Back Darth tells Luke, “No, I am your father!” Retcon! Also, oops, spoiler alert: Vader is Luke’s father). ²

But examples can be found in a wide range of episodic work, sequels, and franchises. Any time a new set of circumstances can’t reasonably be expected to have developed from the previous ones, the previous ones are just…changed. Continuity is retroactively preserved. Or created. 

The notion of a retcon is as useful a way as any to describe the kind of small-scale revisionist history in which organizations and teams partake constantly.

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Back to our team. You’ve just left, for whatever reason. Do you really think in a week or a month or a year the briefings you gave will be remembered as sufficient? No matter how hard you tried to do it thoughtfully, do you think the story of your leaving will be told by the team the way you remember it? Don’t. Because it won’t.

Retconning is a real-life, real-world thing that really happens.

We all do it. “Remember that one person who left? They never really were that committed; they had one foot out the door from the beginning,” (retcon) “and their distractedness really tanked the whole project” (scapegoat). There very well might be a kernel of truth, here, of course. But does the story effectively capture what happened?

Maybe the individual really did have some performance issues. But if they were in a position to be able to tank the whole project, they must have had some reason to be in that position in the first place. And did they really tank the whole project, after all? Or were there…other issues with the project, too? Is it possible that person was even, maybe, just the fingers in the dyke holding back the flood the whole time? It’s worth a thought experiment for sure. Are we sure we’re not conveniently retconning this whole thing?

Dollars to donuts that person has a different version of this story in their mind than the one the team has developed, for sure.

But, wait. Here’s a different scenario. Maybe I’ve left the team, and maybe I truly believe that I handed over beautiful, thorough documentation. But to the folks who received it, it turned out to be worthless gobbledygook because I had assumed broad awareness of some institutional knowledge that was actually much less widespread than I thought. Or maybe I assigned my tasks to the right experts on the team, but it turns out they were already swamped, they now feel completely overburdened with this new work, and they resent the encumbrance.

As I’m no longer on the team, I probably won’t know that it didn’t work the way I’d hoped, and I’ll blissfully move forward remembering it from my perspective. The team’s Story of the Way Things Happened™ will, of course, only incorporate the other side. And over time, that assessment will provide the framework off of which subsequent storytelling will be hung.

From my point of view it wouldn’t be the whole story, but I’m no longer on the team — and from the team’s point of view, it’s useful for explaining and explicating The Way Things Are™. I have served my purpose to the community as scapegoat. And the team has developed an internally consistent (if only mostly factual, and largely true) story to tell about it. 

Assuming good faith on both sides, all of this is reasonable enough. It happens! Be aware of it and move on! 

It can get pernicious if everyone isn’t acting in good faith, though. This is where “fraught” becomes “insidious.” Scapegoating and retconning are ripe for manipulation. Even if not being done consciously, team members can opportunistically hang more problems on that poor goat than are reasonable, including, possibly their own. And all it takes is for these toxic retcons to crystalize, and from then on they will be part of the Story™. 

On a healthy team, it’s incumbent upon all of its members to be aware of this — everyone on the team has the opportunity to shape the narrative and to spot problems in it while those problems are still fresh. Managers and leaders don’t have any particular authority here, in my experience, other than to help remind everyone of the processes underway and to call for thoughtfulness and intentionality. (That won’t work, of course, but it shouldn’t hurt to try.)

One last point, specifically for managers leaving a team. The reality is, none of us can be where we aren’t. As managers we have presumably tried to “build a clock;” that is, create a team which doesn’t require our constant presence to “tell time.” But unless we truly were useless, our presence mattered to some degree — and once we are gone, we’re gone. 

Oh, sure, we’ll try to be reassuring: “I’m not moving to Mars! I’m just changing teams, I’ll still be around. Hit me up if you have questions,” we might say. But that is the kind of nonsense uttered by an idiot (ask me how I know). Because, yeah, in fact we may as well be moving to Mars. Once we’re out of the day-to-day, and especially once we’re paying attention to our new thing, we will be worse than useless. And they’re not going to ask anyway. 

But in the end, I don’t want this to be too dour. Because sometimes we end up as little more than footnotes in the Story™, not scapegoated or retconned, maybe not forgotten, but not really figuring in the larger tale. That’s okay, too. Healthy organizations grow, change, and evolve, and some individual parts of them just end up less conspicuous than others.

And sometimes we’re remembered as heroes! That’s probably retcon too, but it feels a little better.

Anyway, at least some amount of scapegoating is all but inevitable — look how long it’s been going on. It’s ancient and enduring! And when it happens, it will get woven into the tapestry that is the team’s self-narrative. No use fretting about it; it’s probably best to acknowledge it, be conscious of and intentional with it, and attempt to keep it from becoming too toxic. 

1. And then…I guess the goat would be shoved down a ravine to die? My research suggested different specific practices, but whatever. For our purposes, we just need the goat to leave, or escape. (The metaphor — if possibly not the theology — remains meaningful even if the goat just chills in a field after the ceremony.)

2. I know what I said. Yes, this has been argued about for decades. “This isn’t a retcon, Lucas had the whole thing planned out,” some will cry! “Obi Wan was just obfuscating to protect Luke!” I’m unconvinced. I believe the first movie was meant to stand alone until it wasn’t, and I think this is one of the great retcons. But! I also don’t really care: I just wanted an example that everyone would know. The point is still taken, says me.