Participating in team sports is supposed to teach children valuable lessons about life … for example, that losing isn’t the end of the world, only the end of the game. That opponents aren’t enemies is another one.

It appears the New Orleans Saints didn’t get the email. Its players established a bounty system (I’d say “allegedly” except that nobody seems to be denying that it happened), funding a pool that paid players to injure targeted opponents.

Call it managing for results. Defensive coordinator Gregg Williams administered the program. Coach Sean Payton and general manager Mickey Loomis knew of it and did nothing to stop it. Why would they? It helped win games.

Or, call it criminal behavior that won’t be prosecuted: While paying someone to deliberately injure someone else is inarguably a felony, the experts expect prosecutors to defer to the NFL’s jurisdiction.

Imagine you’re NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. It’s your jurisdiction. What’s your first question?

It’s “who did what?” Who, that is, is to blame for this mess. When, as a leader and manager, you learn your organization has engaged in criminal activities, or activities you’ve defined as unacceptable through a policy manual, values statement, or other equivalent vehicle, you need to know whodunit. And you need to deal with them appropriately to make sure they don’t engage your organization in illegal or unethical activities again.

For criminal or unethical behavior, assigning blame … accurately … is essential.

When something else goes wrong, though, your first question should be Goodell’s second question: What characteristic of our organization led to the bad thing happening?

Goodell has ascribed it to culture, but I wonder, because when you count the total value of winning playoff games … including endorsements … there’s serious money at stake.

Regardless, this, and not who’s to blame, should be your first question when something goes wrong because when those in leadership roles ask who’s at fault, they’re making both a logical error and a tactical mistake.

The tactical error: Establishing a game of Whac-A-Mole, where the smart employees keep their heads down, and those who don’t … those who poke their heads out to help fix the situation … end up receiving blows to their noggins.

The logical error is that they’re assuming the conclusion. There are plenty of ways something can go wrong. Those who ask whose fault it is blind themselves to other explanations while fostering a culture of blame.

Last week’s column pointed out the enormous costs of this culture … where the habit is to ask who’s at fault instead of what when wrong. To change it, as is the case with most other changes in culture, what’s needed is a change in leader behavior.

In this case, the solution is literally formulaic: Success = aI + bE + cL. As is usual, a, b, and c are weighting factors. I, E, and L stand for idea, execution, and luck. Success comes from an idea that can work, strong execution, and good luck (or avoiding bad luck) too.

To get rid of a culture of blame, start with the formula whenever something goes wrong. Make it everyone’s habit.

If the idea wasn’t sound, ask whether there was a reasonable way to have discovered this before investing in it. The answer isn’t always yes. Presumably, Apple applied the same evaluation process to both the iPad and Apple TV. Whatever might have prevented Apple TV probably would have stopped development of the iPad, too. Bad trade-off.

If the problem was in execution, there is a possibility that someone screwed up, and if so, that whoever it was didn’t just make a mistake but is a chronic screw-up. It’s possible.

It’s more likely the problem lies in the organization’s systems, processes, or culture. Improving these would pay big dividends.

Even if the source of the problem was a bad employee, termination won’t fix the root cause. Something about the organization’s management practices left a chronic screw-up in place, after all. Fixing this problem would pay even bigger dividends than fixing processes and systems, and that’s assuming the screw-up isn’t screwing up because of poor leadership rather than incompetence or character flaws.

Then there’s bad luck. If that’s what happened, you need better risk management.

It might be worse, though — it might be an even more insidious problem, even harder to fix than a culture of blame: That the whole plan depended on good luck.

Regrettably, we’ll have to wait until next week to handle that little topic.