I am an "event learning" consultant and practitioner and have been since 1974.
When something goes "wrong" — an injury, explosion, loss of revenue, etc. high hazard industries are required to learn from them.
Almost all events of these sorts can be traced to people who did something "wrong," IN RETROSPECT. That is, I'm NOT talking about intentional harm, or morally or ethically "wrong" here. I AM talking about, in retrospect, "I should not have flown my drone in those high wind conditions because it ended up crashing my drone."
I'm trying to use "retrospection" to get people to realize what they DID, and then get them to acknowledge that whatever they did was "wrong." "I flew my drone in high wind conditions, and in retrospect I acknowledge this was wrong."
There are parts of our behavior that are"wrong" in the sense that they will either harm us or other people — even though we are not aware of them at the time.
But in using the word "wrong," I am getting a lot of push-back these days from people thinking "it's a finger pointing exercise." Far from that, we're asking individual people to look at themselves as part of an incident and SELF-ADMIT what they did that contributed to an incident.
I need to know the kinds of things I do that are "wrong," so that I can change those kinds of things.
So again, can anyone thing of a better word to use instead of:
Who did what WRONG? A word that does not imply morally or ethically "bad?"
Thank you
Best Answer
I would simply say that something was done incorrectly:
And shift the emphasis away from who and put it on what.
This doesn't imply intent, nor does it imply fault. Something can be done incorrectly without anybody being aware of what the correct method is. Perhaps they were never shown the instructions—or instructions were never written.
And if you ask it in a what form, it leaves it open for people to talk about the event, not about the person. (Anybody who claims they did it incorrectly would be taking responsibility themselves rather than feeling judged by somebody else.)
Unlike words such as error and mistake, where the implication can be that something was known but not followed and that somebody was to blame, incorrect is a purely objective statement. Although the dictionary definition associates it with wrong, it's not in the normative sense that is normally associated with it.
In corporate jargon, a common way of expressing this is not to say anything negative at all. Instead, people ask, "How can we improve things next time?" or "What opportunities for improvement can you identify?" The statement about the situation is reversed into something positive. I can see how it has some value, although I've personally felt it slightly disingenuous—a kind of politically correct way of avoiding the actual issue.