Failure Is Unacceptable

You have failed me for the last time, Captain Needa! -- DarthVader

A common AntiPattern, consisting of:

The belief that all activities performed by an enterprise are deterministic and repeatable, and thus should all complete according to prepared plans
The belief that any and all failures (meaning any deviation from what is expected) are caused by avoidable human error--i.e. carelessness or worse.
Therefore, it is decreed that failing is not acceptable, and that whenever a failure occurs SomeoneMustBePunished to reinforce the message. The actual consequences (to the organization) of the failure--whether severe or not--are not important; the problem is that a failure occurred (or more specifically, was allowed to occur).

Sometimes, of course, failure is indeed unacceptable. A diagnostic medical device that manages to kill patients--even if .001%--is clearly not a good thing. But most activities are quite fault-tolerant. In the management context, business plans that cannot withstand quite a bit of failure to execute (in other words, those which require everything to go right in order to be successful), are themselves questionable. Most businesses will not go under if a salesman only makes 99% of his quota, or a project is late by a day.

Many activities, of course, are not deterministic--or cannot be made 100% foolproof. A classic analogy for this from baseball is the observation that the best hitters in the game fail to get on base 2/3 of the time; a batting average of .333 is considered excellent. (I'm being a bit sloppy here in my discussion of baseball, as "batting average" doesn't equate exactly with "getting on base"; but that's beside the point for this discussion). On the other hand, an outfielder whose fielding percentage is only .950 (meaning he makes an error 1 out of 20 times a fly ball comes his way) is considered a poor (defensive) player.

And when failure does occur; often times it is not due to unprofessionalism or carelessness.

You're fired. -- PointyHairedBoss

Fired? You mean I no longer have to spend 120 hours/week in the office? Oh, please don't throw me in the briar patch!

One negative SideEffect of this particular AntiPattern is that everyone in the organization lives in FearOfBeingFired; and thus engages in highly risk-averse behavior (schedule padding, etc.) to prevent failing. The result is an organization which is higly inefficient, and which may fail its overall business objectives. Depending on the nature of the company, this may eventually lead to top management being replaced; or the organization may struggle on in this fashion for years, as the losses are absorbed by the corporate parent.

This is evidently related to, but not the same as, FailureIsNotAnOption?

Similar enough; perhaps a ReFactoring is in order?