Gifts, Shifts, Drifts, Rifts, and Sifts
We live in the world of Twitter, social media and instant messaging and
because of these gifts transparency will eventually prevail yet until then we
will all plod on in less than ideal situations. We must acknowledge
improvements and praise efforts yet attribution errors and socialization of
consequences is wrong for many ubiquitous reasons so the harping
continues. This is about organizational resilience ultimately. High reliability
requires resilient responses and true lessons learned and movement
towards correction and the lessons require diligent, honest and effortful
assessments of situations and improvements of situations. Individual
accountability is a different subject. Neither subject is currently handled
well by prosecutors or industry in general as evidenced by the lack of
widespread effort to embrace situational focus in human factors. The
government acts dispositionally because the easy button is to call a
frontline worker a bumbler, a CEO a crook or a company a chronic
offender. Reason scientific studies and organizational shifts have proved
the merit of the Just Culture yet we drift back to old habits to easily.
Attribution errors must be stopped before true efforts to make growingly
difficult and complex operations safe are possible. It's difficult to ignore that
Macondo was an organizational accident of an organization creating
situations highly conducive to all human errors, yet the government is
making it look easy and making the same error that the most irresponsible
count on to justify their modus operandi; rifting authority and responsibility
through fundamental attribution error and socialization of consequences.
For the record the main progress we made during this latest catastrophe
was to refuse to allow the major socialization of consequences with the
caveat that attributing cause to one person is indeed socializing the
consequences of that mistake in judgment and assessment. Forcing a
company to take responsibility ex post facto isn't the same as guaranteeing
all companies mitigate worst case scenarios and costs internally prior to
execution of plans and procedures by normal fallible people and all our
flaws and flawed situations. Point being, just because a company steps up
and does the right thing after the fact doesn't mean that we know how to
measure and manage risk assessments to ensure that we don’t drift
toward wishful thinking that socializes consequences with the worst being
the death of an innocent human simply following orders or flawed
procedures, designs and orders. People with experience as the company
man on projects know that when the boss says do something you do it or
you’re replaced and know and understand that situation clearly, yet the
government and CEOs, seeking authority without coupled responsibility,
will suddenly claim mental deficiency to this fact and fear making a
connection from authority to responsibility is legally impossible. The
resulting angst legitimizes, sanctions and institutionalizes dangerous rifts
between authority and responsibility. CEOs grab ultimate responsibility
when justifying the $millions in salary and bonuses, etc., yet quickly shift
responsibility when rationalizing punishment of the “authority”
“responsible”. CEOs proclaim ultimate authority during profitable times
things are going right, yet shift "the bag" of “responsibility” to the company
“authority”, aka the “valued” frontline worker on the rig and fire them the
minute the things go wrong and losses mount. Disgusting... Mark Twain
said, "The more I know about humans the better I like my dog". We need
more Mark Twain and less of whatever we have right now. Einstein said, "If
poor people could die for rich people they could make a good living", and
the frontline workers in this type of blame society were being referenced
and don't mention they were not poor because they made good money
doing that job because this blame society is poised to impoverish them
now. The ultimate victim will be all of us if the easy button of blame is
used to circumvent the more difficult task of sifting through situational facts
with circumspection. The system needs improvement and there is no easy
button in fact if it looks easy we should be very suspicious and continue to
sift through complex issues and ambiguous uncertainty until we all see the
common thread.