I suddenly realized the reason why I tend to avoid “messes” that was not created by me, and can be quite defensive about them. The society and culture here (in this case Singapore) has inculcated into us a culture of “finger pointing” and the “blame trap”. When things go wrong, our instinctive reaction would be “who did that?” This happens not only in the work environment, but also at home; especially so at home between parents and their child. Instead of trying to work together with whoever was responsible for the “mess” to try and fix things, or do some damage control; we enter the “blame deflection mode”. This culture is taught to the kids at a very young age, and thus is carried into the very society we live in and it became a culture. As such, when things go wrong at home, if it was not the child’s vault, they tend to adopt an avoidant attitude and not wanting much to do with the whole matter; with the child thinking that it was not their fault and the responsible person should fix the problem. We forget that we are a team, or a family, and should stand together as a unit to fix the mess. Something goes wrong in the household, it may not be my fault, but I will ultimately be affected by any fallout that resulted from the mess. I grew up in such a household, and was the victim of such conditioning. I was learning through observation what my parents were doing, and modeled them accordingly.
The problem here is that such attitudes do not get confined to the household. It carries into the society. That’s probably one of the reasons why it is “everyone for themselves” out in the corporate world, and why the corporate world is so “cold”. We forget that fallout from such “messes” tend to spill over into the entire company, regardless of the size of the “mess”.
Now that I know I was conditioned this way, I can now try to change this attitude. Hopefully, in bringing this to light, others will also see that problem too (if they had one to begin with).
