Continuing the exploration of each of Satir’s survival stances and considering how they may appear within teams, leadership groups, and organisational systems: we start with the coping stance of BLAMING. In Virginia Satir’s model, the Blamer seeks safety through control. When feeling threatened, a person operating from the blaming stance often focuses attention outward. Fault is located elsewhere. Responsibility is assigned. Certainty replaces curiosity.

At its core, blaming is an attempt to manage anxiety. Most leaders can recognise this pattern in individuals. The more interesting question is whether entire teams or organisations can begin to exhibit similar behaviours. Consider what often happens after a significant setback. For example, a project fails; a major customer leaves; financial targets are missed; a critical initiative stalls.

The immediate response may appear constructive: “What went wrong?”, however, in some organisations this quickly becomes: “Who caused this?”
Attention shifts from understanding to attribution; from learning to fault-finding; from improvement to protection.

The consequences can be significant. Innovation declines because people become reluctant to take risks and information moves more slowly because bad news becomes dangerous.  Collaboration weakens as individuals focus on self-protection. Over time, the organisation may become highly efficient at identifying mistakes while becoming increasingly ineffective at learning from them. This does not mean accountability is unimportant, quite the opposite: healthy accountability requires ownership, transparency, and honest feedback. The difference lies in intention. Accountability seeks understanding in the service of improvement……blame seeks certainty in the service of reducing anxiety.

From a Satir perspective, blaming behaviour often signals that something deeper is occurring beneath the surface. Perhaps trust has been damaged, perhaps uncertainty feels intolerable. Maybe leaders are under intense pressure from stakeholders, or previous failures have created a collective fear. These underlying dynamics may be more important than the visible behaviour itself. Satir consistently encouraged practitioners to look beneath behaviour and explore the deeper processes that give rise to it.

For organisational leaders, this raises a powerful question: when blame appears, what anxiety might the system be attempting to manage? Answering that question may reveal more about organisational health than any post-project review ever could. In the next article, we will explore another of Satir’s survival stances and consider how organisations sometimes seek safety through accommodation rather than accusation.