The Scapegoat Pattern
It's not random. The scapegoat is selected for their position, not their culpability. They're visible enough to absorb blame but not powerful enough to deflect it.
Deliberate before you decide. To deliberate after deciding is disgrace. Valluvar’s standard is precise: think first, then commit. Reversing that order is failure. Scapegoating is the ultimate reversal: the decision is made, the outcome fails, and then the organisation deliberates, not about the decision, but about who to blame. The same person gets blamed every time. Have you noticed? It’s not random. The scapegoat is selected for their position, not their culpability. They’re visible enough to absorb blame but not powerful enough to deflect it.
Credit Suisse’s risk managers warned about Archegos Capital’s exposure. I read the internal review commissioned after the $5.5 billion loss. Risk officers raised the alarm. Their warnings were overruled by the prime brokerage division’s revenue targets. When Archegos collapsed in March 2021, the risk managers who had warned correctly were presented as if they had failed. The scapegoat pattern requires someone to absorb the blame that belongs to the system. At Credit Suisse, the people who saw the fire coming were blamed for not putting it out, by the people who were fueling it.
Scapegoating is an immune system error. In immunology, a misdirected immune response occurs when the body’s defense system attacks healthy tissue instead of the actual pathogen. Autoimmune disorders don’t fix the infection. They destroy the host. Organizational scapegoating works identically: the system identifies a visible target, attacks it, and convinces itself the problem is solved. The actual dysfunction, the systemic cause, remains untouched. The scapegoat absorbs all the immune response. The real disease progresses. Next quarter, there’s a new scapegoat. Same symptom. Same misdiagnosis. Same destruction of a healthy cell.
The next time a project fails, ask two questions: First: “Who is being blamed?” Second: “What systemic factor made this outcome likely regardless of who was in the role?” If the answer to the second question is more explanatory than the first, you’re watching a scapegoat being manufactured.
That blame magnet has a name. The Scapegoat Pattern. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Untie The Knot
Uproot
The scapegoat pattern formed because systemic analysis was harder than individual blame. When a project fails, naming a person feels like resolution. Examining the system feels like admitting the system is broken. The scapegoat protects the system from self-awareness.
Navigate
Post-mortems separate system failures from individual performance. When someone is accountable, it’s for their specific decisions, not for systemic conditions they didn’t control.
Tool
DMG / Post-Mortem: the protocol that traces failure to root cause (systemic, structural, resourcing) before assigning individual accountability. DMG prevents blame from substituting for diagnosis.
Implement
Next time a project fails, ask two questions: ‘Who is being blamed?’ and ‘What systemic factor made this outcome likely regardless of who held the role?’ If the second is more explanatory, you’re witnessing a scapegoat.
Emerge
When blame is replaced by diagnosis, the same failure stops recurring, people take on risky projects without fear of being the next target, and the organisation starts learning from its mistakes.