After repeatedly doing something stupid and making a mess, my daughter kept saying “Det var inte meningen!” (“This wasn’t my intention!”) stronger and stronger like some magic spell that stopped working all of a sudden. Like it’s only the intention that matters, if you didn’t intend to do something, you are not responsible for your actions whatsoever.
Reality is not quite like that, many times. Intention matters a lot in some situations, where you get a smaller punishment if it was an accident (for example murder versus manslaughter). In other situations, intention doesn’t play any role at all, like when you are speeding and you get caught by a speed trap on camera.
If we switch our attention to software development, we tend to always assume no bad intent when a developer pushes code or does a change which causes an incident, sometimes at great cost for their employer. Instead we do a post-mortem which is blameless and we try to figure out what went wrong and learn from it so it doesn’t happen again, or at least, it doesn’t happen again in the same way.
Even in the situation where one person causes an issue that could have a potential big impact on the business of the company, they don’t get blamed. The developer who caused it gets to help out cleaning up together with other colleagues. Fixing it is a team sport.
The reason things work like this is to keep people from being afraid to try because of the consequences. In software development companies we have a cultural contract that while it doesn’t encourage people to make mistakes in production, it doesn’t generally condemn them, because it is more damaging to the company to have a culture where nobody dares to change anything than one that accepts potential mistakes as a necessary part of the process.
And then there are company owners. Limited liability means that a founder can burn through millions in investor capital, shut down, and start fresh next week without facing any charges (or as long as there was no proven fraud or gross negligence). Here, intention barely enters the picture - what matters is that the system is designed to encourage risk-taking. The reason for this is that starting companies is hard, filled with risks and without this way of creating businesses, very few people would even take the chance and then economies would stagnate.
The way we look at intentions, actions and their effects differs depending on the severity, on the field of activity and of course by what cultural and legal norms we have in place in our society. As tempted as I was to not miss a teachable moment and tell my daughter that she needs to always own the impact of her actions regardless of her intentions, reality is that we don’t have a clear cut rule in our daily life, but it is generally a good principle to live by.