The playground of an elementary school, somewhere on a weekday morning. It is recess and there is busy playing, running, screaming, laughing. One group of children stands out, they are busy and exuberant, running after a ball and teasing other children in their play.

Then suddenly a window breaks. The master is called in. He looks penetratingly at the group of soccer players and asks, pointing to the broken glass: "which of you did this?" No child raises a finger. A more vocal "not me master" sounds simultaneously from all mouths.

This is not a surprising response to such a question. We humans do very badly on guilt, on being the guilty party. After all, it often means trouble in paradise: he who burns his buttocks (read is guilty), has to suffer.And nobody wants that.

The paradox is that at the same time we are quite fond of the question of guilt.When something drastic or bad happens, we immediately start looking and pointing: someone has to be responsible for this mess, and even more so, they will know it: they have to bleed or at least pay. And the more pressure there is on the system, the more radical we become in our judgments of guilty/not guilty. We need only look at the current corona problem to see this phenomenon everywhere. 

But it is also common in work situations. With disappointing results or stalled cooperation, people start looking for the cause of the problem and it quickly becomes personal: "It must have been Liza again, she is so inflexible, everything always has to go her way and then you get this". However, if you point out to Liza that she is inflexible, chances are that she will look at you with big eyes and ask if you are aware of how chaotic you are.

And there you are, directly opposite each other, far away from a solution to your common problem. 

What is then needed is what they so beautifully call in systemic work: "exoneration." If you distance yourself a little from what happened, you see that people's behavior is actually always logical, they act from what they know. No one is intentionally in it to mess things up (barring a single psychopathological case, but those are really exceptions, fortunately).

Or as co-trainer Joost once remarked, "No one is a gland for fun."

It starts with the sincere question to each other: how do you see? What do you see that I don't (yet)?

Exoneration brings air into the system, it calms emotions, creating space to look further together. And let there often lie the new solution to the problem you were trying to fix.

For inspiration: read the interview with Rotterdam general practitioner Shakib Sana VolkskrantJanuary 6, 2022 This article beautifully and grippingly reveals the power of innocence.

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