“So as consensus goes, someone has to take the blame for the problems that occurred.”
Unfortunately, that's kind of the way it is. I remember one manager I worked with also gave me a bad review which conflicted with good reviews on other clients, and later that year fought to get me back on his client since everyone else had left the firm.
As far as how to proceed, there could be a few situations:
1) They intend to fire you eventually, and want to put you on a “performance plan” to show you've been notified
2) They do NOT intend to fire you, but are running low on projected turnover office-wide, so a few bad reviews for “low performers” will hopefully take care of that problem by itself
3) Someone hates the way you look/smell/taste and that's just the way it goes
As far as what to do about it, you should consider opportunities outside the firm. It's tough to really know which of the situations you are in, as they don't exactly fill you in that the goal is to lay you off. For your own knowledge, it's good to know where you stand in the job market overall.
As a personal story, I got another bad review by the same manager AFTER he fought to get me back on his client… and I told the scheduler I wanted to get out. He was just a tough person overall, and the job was poorly managed, so it made the staff/senior look bad when it didn't go smoothly. If I had instead gotten a good review, and stayed another few months until getting promoted, I may actually still be at the firm today. Instead, I started looking at opportunities at other public firms and in industry, and landed a promotion and massive pay raise to get into internal audit staff at a large public company. This would NOT have happened the same way if I hadn't looked around at that time, so I suppose in some ways I got lucky that manager was such a d*bag.
Moral of the story: at least once a year, test the job market. You never know what you're missing. Even if you are happy, it's still good to reinforce that with some searching. If nothing better comes up, then great. If something does, then that's great too.
.