Deniability

I read short but provocative post by Seth Godin on deniability. He asked how much of your time on a project is spent on CYA, excuse preparation, and generally making sure that you won't be blamed if the project doesn't ship.

I've worked places where the cost of being blamable for a project failing was very high. In those organizations a lot of energy was spent on finger-pointing and blame avoidance. How many more projects would have succeeded if all that energy had gone into the project instead of the politics?

Can an organization that is blame oriented successfully implement agile development practices? It seems unlikely. In a blame oriented organization, pointing out impediments is risky. And if no one points out impediments, they don't get removed.