Tunde Oyeneyin asks, “Who’s to blame?”
Before I dive into the scenario, a caveat: it’s an inane story, about two friends and a misplaced borrowed dish. But fitness instructors have to share a lot of inane stories, to fill the airtime while telling people to lift weights, cycle, run, or row. We expect it. There’s no judgement about sharing the story.
Anyway. Tunde’s friend Rad asks Tunde to cook a special dish. Tunde does, packages it in her fancy food storage dish, and gives it to Rad. What follows is a five month long comedy of communication errors, almost all over text, of Tunde trying to get the dish back, Rad trying to get the dish to her, only to eventually discover it’s been lost. Placed in a bag by her work locker months ago, now long lost to time, cleanup, or errant pickup by a fellow instructor. If you really want to hear the story, you can take the Peloton class yourself.
So who is to blame here?
Lesson: When mistakes happen, don’t waste energy blaming people; invest energy in building better systems. (1% Leadership, Chapter 32)
Humans have an innate urge to assign blame. But between friends, blame can only be toxic, because it pushes a cost onto one person, usually higher than they would have pulled in. “Neither a borrower nor a lender be” says Polonius in Hamlet, and most people remember that quote as fiscal advice, forgetting the next line, “For loan oft loses both itself and friend.”
The system that failed was the loaning of a high-value food storage container. If you’re lucky, you get them back, but rarely immediately. Instead, a better system for someone who is happy to cook for others is to have giveaway food storage containers, so that you don’t lend anything. Those of us with kosher kitchens rarely want them back anyway; unless we’re sending food into another kosher household, we can’t bring the dish back. Makes it a lot easier to just buy a stack of the same food storage containers that restaurants use for takeout.
Lesson: An uncompelled apology unburdens everyone. (1% Leadership, Chapter 8)
Both participants in this saga would do well to apologize to the other. Not to take all of the blame, but to recognize that they could have done better (phone calls do wonders!). The apology, especially over something so trivial as a food container, creates space to negate the worry about lingering blamemongering.
Lesson: Regret is an act of forgiveness to your past self. (1% Leadership, Chapter 9)
There’s a reason these two chapters are side-by-side. Tunde can regret not having disposable food containers, which feeds into both the apology (putting Rad in a position to have to return it) and the better system (doing so for next time, and actually making an entertainingly big deal about using them). Rad can regret not returning the dish more quickly and with clearer real-time communication so it didn’t end up lost. Those become apologies, true, but they also become internal promises to do better.
This isn’t really a big deal, but it highlights a tension that often happens in personal relationships, when a small thing becomes a much bigger thing, especially in one person’s story.