Edward D. Miller is a newsroom leadership coach and management consultant to newspapers around the world. He is a former director of ASNE and a founder of the Society for News Design. Reach him at miller@newsroomleadership.com

WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN SOMETHING goes wrong? Odds are you look for someone to blame. Your motives are good - fix the problem and instruct the guilty. But consider this: You may be missing the real problem.

When errors and oversights beg for an explanation, people have a tendency to attribute flaws to the people most intimately involved. Psychologists call it the "fundamental attribution error." Instead of looking for systemic causes - inadequate training, muddled communication, unrelenting stress inherent in the job - we attribute the failure to the people. In a daily newspaper, when mistakes are in bold type on the front page, "Clyde did it again!" is an easy course to take. But by blaming Clyde you risk overlooking a contributing systemic problem.

Reinforcing this tendency to blame people instead of processes are what psychologists call "rationalization effects," the need to make sense out of events and circumstances even if we have made up explanations. It's also called second-guessing. Here's Richard Chase writing in the Harvard Business Review (June 2001):

"People want explanations, and they'll make them up if they have to. The explanation will nearly always focus on something they can observe - something that is discrete and concrete. ..."

In short, we look for explanations that focus on the actors on center stage, not the systemic forces at work behind the scenes. Putting a human face on the problem seems to satisfy the need to explain and blame. Whatever "Clyde's" role in the problem, it tends to be magnified, while fundamental problems in the system are overlooked.

How can an editor avoid the fundamental attribution error? When something goes wrong, don't immediately look for culprits. Think first about circumstances that might have contributed to the problem. Here are a few obvious candidates:

• Inadequate training: Nothing gets more lip service and fewer resources than newsroom training, especially in a time of diminishing resources. Beat reporters are expected to develop expertise with little or no help from editors. Assigning editors responsible for those reporters are given even less training. Reporters and photographers moving into their first supervisory jobs are expected to master skills totally unrelated to their craft. Under these circumstances, mistakes are predictable, and predictably, people will suffer the blame, not the inadequate system of training.

• Lack of clear goals: The most important question in management is, "What do you want?" Yet too often newsroom goals are vague, contradictory or nonexistent. What's more, goals are often confused with prayers. "I want better writing in my section" is a noble objective, but it is not a goal. It's a prayer. The difference is in how you measure success. Goals have specific, mutually agreed-upon standards by which progress can be measured. When someone's work doesn't meet an editor's expectations, the problem is often the lack of clarity about those expectations.

• Incremental deadlines: Few newsrooms teach the principles of project management. As assignments get more technologically complex, involve more people and stretch out over more time, the management skills change. For example, projects require incremental deadlines to stay on track, yet too often the deadlines - and the reasons to have them - are overlooked. When the results are late or poorly executed, people are blamed instead of the lack of project-management experience.

This is not an appeal to exonerate those people who share in the responsibility for things that go wrong, but it is a suggestion to look beyond the obvious and think about managing the hidden systemic contributors before the errors occur.