We are living in an era dominated by the “deficit model” of existence—an environment defined by the constant, exhausting rhythm of the blame game.
“When a system falters, the reflex is not to seek understanding, but to locate a scapegoat.” NB: I could only find a Hippo in my photos but you get the idea?
We play the blame game to assign liability, hand down sanctions, and create a paper trail of defensive compliance. Whether we look at the suffocating web of school inspection and public/private sector compliance frameworks, the finger-pointing cycles of global politics, or the outrage-optimised algorithms of Silicon Valley, one question rings out:
“Who is to blame, and how can we prove it? Did we audit them?”
It’s a worldwide epidemic, tying international development, corporate funding, and educational partnerships to rigid, standardised compliance metrics, those who hold the purse strings have forced diverse, organic human communities to conform to a clinical, deficit-oriented template of success.
This is a systemic sickness that affects how we govern, design, and imagine our collective global future.
System Continuity that 30 Year old File:
Sometimes, the greatest act of defiance is simply refusing to let a good idea be buried by the passing of time.
don’t be misled by the cult of the new
Onto “the next big disruptive innovation.” Nope, I say look back. Blow the dust off a 30-year-old memory and say: the human truths we knew back then, are still truths. Lets innovate by building on what we already know, and walk alongside the modern tools with our humanity intact.
Sometime in the late nineties I applied Appreciative Inquiry in a school that had just had a thoroughly demoralising Ofsted Inspection - it came out good - but the staff didn’t. I wrote the research up as an article and also found the original presentation files from a Headteachers’ Conference I led as Director of Schools back in 2003. I realise the heavy bureaucratic structures we navigated then—the endless audits, the deficit perspective, the blame game—carry the exact same weight and human toll, as the systems we navigate today. What a waste of time
Appreciative Inquiry: A Different “A.I.”
My Quiet Rebellion: Beyond Deficit
As Education Director for Babcock International Group PLC over 20 years ago, I worked with this approach of Appreciative Inquiry. I was at the intersection of corporate engineering precision and public-sector educational delivery. My role was focused on institutional resilience—applying the rigorous systems-thinking of a FTSE 100 organisation to the organic, human needs of building schools. communities."in very h worked whatever the setting and have applied it in hen the focus is entirely on
When I founded The Elliot Foundation it was a deliberate act of structural rebellion against a blame game culture and a deficit mindset which in turn triggered a cascade of fear. Instead we collectively chose to build a family of schools with a belief that “there is something great to discover in every school”
Appreciative Inquiry teaches us that all human systems grow in the direction of the questions asked.
If we constantly ask, “Why are you failing?”, we breed anxiety, defensiveness, and bureaucratic compliance.
If we instead ask, “When is working or learning most alive, joyful, and meaningful here? How do we grow that?” we unlock professional trust, courage, and genuine human flourishing.
AI is not soft optimism or “toxic positivity,” It is a highly rigorous, strengths-based methodology. It demands that we look at the reality of our successes with the same clinical accuracy that the bureaucratic systems reserve for our failures.
Appreciative Systems
We are growing global citizens who are living in a deeply fragile, hyper-connected world facing systemic upheavals.
If we apply a deficit model—or let’s call it The Global Blame Game—to these challenges, we freeze. We become paralysed pointing fingers at who broke the world, retreat into our silos, and allow digital automated feeds to create shared anxiety.
A global citizen practicing Appreciative Inquiry looks at the horizon differently., stepping out of the blame cycle to ask:
Where are the sanctuaries of human resilience? Where are the communities, the intergenerational projects, and the human networks that are successfully safeguarding trust and local agency?
How do we design for human potential? Instead of using technology to track, monitor, and optimise human compliance, how do we use it to amplify our cooperative capacities?
What is my 75-year legacy? To be a good ancestor, I cannot leave behind a list of global crises I managed to survive. surely we need to leave living examples of human-first systems that worked.
Appreciative Inquiry reminds us that whether you are leading a FTSE 100 company, raising a child, leading a primary school, or designing a global initiative, the rules of human nature do not change.
We do not flourish under suspicion, metrics, and audits. We flourish when we are seen, trusted, and invited to contribute to something larger than ourselves.
The Reading Room is a library built not to catalogue who is to blame for what is wrong with our world, but to store the wisdom, the relationships, and the frameworks that help us connect and belong.