Shift Blame

Definitions

1. To redirect responsibility away from yourself or your team instead of engaging honestly with the part you control. In engineering slang, blame shifting is one of the fastest ways to make cross-team incidents longer and trust lower.

   In plain English: To move responsibility onto others instead of owning your part.

   Example: "The postmortem avoided useful progress whenever people started to shift blame instead of mapping the shared failure path honestly."

Related Terms

• Back of the Napkin
• Blame Game
• Code Circus
• Cut and Run
• Help Vampire
• Hot Potato
• Stay in Your Lane
• Under the Bus