How To Avoid Taking Responsibility

Seeing as we are all so good at avoiding responsibility I thought I would help make it easier for you by collecting some of the best ways of blame shifting for us all to use.

Committees, action groups, and investigative boards are a great way to avoid responsibility. Set one up, deliberately do not name a head, give them a vague enough frame of reference (nice technical term that, throwing technical terms around that no one understands is also a great way to shift blame), and when they fail to deliver after consuming a nice padded budget there is no one to blame because the committee will go round in circles pointing fingers at each other.

If you cannot get on a committee or use technical jargon here are a few other ways of avoiding people blaming you for something you should have done. Always have a scapegoat, pick on someone else in the organisation who you can blame, preferably in a different department. Practice the shrug, shrugging your shoulders with a vacant expression on your face is a great way to ignore an issue. It is the non verbal equivalent of “I am not the one” and is guaranteed to send people storming off in a rage, and if they are storming away from you then they are not bothering you are they. Never pick up litter, you did not put it there, you are not the cleaner, it is not your job. Likewise never actually mention to the person littering that the bin is five meters away, again its his litter not yours. Practise the turnabout argument, shift the blame back to the other person like a rapist blaming the rape victim for wearing clothes that were too alluring with an “I raped her because her skirt was too short” type excuse. Blame the equipment, it cannot fight back. Blame Econet/Netone/Telecel, everyone has cellphone issues at some point. Create long and arduous, bureaucratic chains of command. The more steps there are to doing something, the more likely someone else can be blamed. Never, never, never work through a tea break or lunch break to meet a deadline, these are your God given right and must never be sacrificed, you can always blame the poor work hours though cause there is never enough time to do everything.