What is systems thinking blame?

Systems thinking blame is a concept in personal epistemology: Focusing on who caused an error prevents understanding why it happened.

Example: A product launch misses its deadline by three weeks. In the retrospective, the VP asks 'who dropped the ball?' The engineering lead is identified — she missed a dependency in the project plan. She is put on a performance improvement plan. Six months later, a different team misses a different deadline for structurally identical reasons: an untracked cross-team dependency. The organization learned nothing because it answered the wrong question. It asked 'who failed?' when it should have asked 'what about our planning process fails to surface cross-team dependencies?' The first question produces a scapegoat. The second produces a systemic fix.

This concept is part of Phase 25 (Error Correction) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for error correction.