Assigning Responsibility

By Kate | Permalink |

No Comments | April 17th, 2007 | Trackback

Often volunteering happens with the aim of solving a given problem or improving some situation – doing anything more than merely alleviating ill effects often involves making assumptions about what caused the situation; once this is established, you can go about changing things so the problem doesn’t occur again.

It’s quite common in many fields (business, science, statistics) to base predictions about the future on events from the past, making an educated guess about why those things happened.

It’s come to my attention, though, in large part during my experience working and volunteering abroad that this drive to assign responsibility, for the ostensible goal of preventing anything similar from happening again, is stronger in some cultures than others. It is hard coming from one viewpoint to understand the other: often my own first instinct – when confronted with some obviously non-ideal situation – is simply to find who or what is responsible..or simply ask why things are so. There may be examples of that in my posts here at the Volunteer Logue. At the opposite extreme would be the view that bad things sometimes just happen; you can’t understand them and you may well lose your sanity trying, so just do the best you can or give help and move on.

The danger of the second view may be apparent to many readers: that something which could have been avoided may still happen in the future. The danger of the first may be less clear, but I think it is that in the haste to assign responsibility or blame, attention may be diverted from the bigger picture or focused in one area – possibly the wrong one - when a real future solution necessitates a broader understanding. Or that help that could have benefited someone negatively affected is not given because people are too busy looking for a cause.

At the risk of sounding ridiculously vague, someone who had lived through a recent war said, in connection to a natural disaster on the news some time ago, something to the effect of, “It would be hard to go through life believing that things like this could be prevented if only people had done things differently.”. (Granted, this would probably be a lot clearer in context but I’d rather not open that can of worms).

I’m certainly not the first to come up with this concept, but the challenge seems to be to find the right balance between these two extremes.