The author of The Fearless Organisation is righting the wrong. Tim Marsh takes a look at Amy Edmondson’s new approach.
Recently the concept of psychological safety has been updated by author Harvard Professor Amy Edmondson in her new book, The Right Kind of Wrong. In many respects it’s a reworking of material also covered really well in her own work and other books such as Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed, but it includes a simple taxonomy that cross references Just Culture as well as emotional intelligence and an array of other areas that a safety professional might find useful.
In fact, I’d like to make the case that it cross references just about everything a safety professional might find useful.
Syed suggests the best companies, people, even societies go forward best when they have an adult, objective and analytical approach to human error. In another best seller, Mindset, by Carol Dweck, it’s suggested that we just need three questions to succeed: What’s going wrong? Why’s it going wrong? and What are we going to do about that?’ Dweck isn’t in the safety field but this itself cross references Andrew Hopkins’ mindful safety culture where he suggests all organisations are chock full of problems with the best actively seeking the issues out and the weaker cultures waiting for problems to find them.
At this point we could well consider the best types of behavioural safety when we go to front-line experts and give them some training in ABC (temptation) analysis, Just Culture, Five Whys etc. and then ask them the three Dweck questions. And/or we make sure this pro-active mindset is the key element of a management walk and talk.
But this article is not about such methodologies (vitally important to a strong culture as they are) so back to Edmondson’s helpful taxonomy where she suggests there are three types of error:
I’ll paraphrase here but by this she means a cock-up, potentially by a thoughtless idiot. In Sidney Dekker’s terms they ‘zigged’ when they should have ‘zagged’ and they bloody well should have known that they should not have ‘zigged’
Before we get to blame- and consequence- driven in our thinking however, it’s always worth taking a holistic and humanistic approach to the situation. Indeed, I’d argue it’s utterly essential to ask why the event occurred genuinely, curiously, knowing that there’s very often more to it than meets the eye. (For more insight, please see any article of my articles for SHP on culture, especially Just Culture and specifically the articles on F.I. and F.U. scores). Were they distracted by issues at home? Utterly fatigued? Rushing? Upset? Frustrated? Angry? Struggling with their mental health? Menopausal? Promoted to a job that doesn’t suit them with little or no training? Or 1001 other issues.
And learning? Well, even if it was a cock-up by a thoughtless idiot who has all the tools and time they need and who while physically and mentally fit, was working in an empowering, learning-based and supportive culture, we should still have a think about the clown who selected them in the first place. Then, we can have a think about the clown who selected and trained that clown, which might well be us ourselves of course. I’m sure you get the idea).
Here they ‘zig’ when they should have ‘zagged’ but it’s not fair to blame them with the benefit of hindsight because to any reasonable person, both ‘zigging’ and ‘zagging’ would have looked perfectly viable before the event, for example, applying the Elvis quote that we should always walk in another man’s shoes before quoting them.
Here we can cross reference the work of Dave Snowden – the academic complexity theorist of the Cynefin Framework. In the world of safety specifically, Sydney Dekker’s book, Drift into Failure covers similar territory.
Credit: Cagkan Sayin/Alamy Stock Photo
Well in all three cases, and as briefly covered above, it’s all about learning. Whether it’s a simple ‘curious why’ mindset or a deep dive panel of experts, the efficacy of whatever happens next has an upper limit set by the accuracy of the analysis that follows. I genuinely think a current frontier in safety thinking is to get all organisations into a mindset where a continuous improvement commitment to the facilitation of error reduction is paramount. In my experience, many have moved on from knee-jerk blame but are still primarily frustrated by human error.
We’re often asked how do we stop people making silly mistakes? The answer is we don’t – we provide an environment where the number is minimised and where, when they inevitably occur, the consequences are minimised. Nothing more complicated than basic Bow Tie work applied to human fallibility in all its weird and woderful guises.
Obviously, this a huge area with lots of useful books and methodologies available to consider. An updated Definitive Guide to BBS is out in a few months but book plugs aside, there are two individual mind-sets Edmondson rightly stresses that can transform a career or even life.
Own it and work it
As well as being constructively involved in all of the above, Edmondson suggests that at an individual level, “owning it” is key which is all about minimising defensiveness and instead being open to reflection and coaching. Again, this isn’t at all new, Matthew Syed covered the ‘no guarantees either way but you tend to get the luck you deserve depending on the pro-active graft you put in’ approach in his book Bounce. Again, he doesn’t reference what we in the safety world know as Heinrich’s Principle but essentially the whole book is about it.
Don’t Bulls**t
Edmondson of course doesn’t use that term. In his bestseller, Drop the Pink Elephant, Bill McFarlan says that when you have made a mistake you can do several things. Deny it, fudge it, make like Alistair Campbell and reframe it; or pretend to faint like Basil Fawlty and Gillian McKeith. These, he says, can of course be effective but only ever in the short term.
For longer term effectiveness, you must apply the simple ‘regret, reason, remedy’ approach which is essentially apologise properly, explain honestly why what happened happened; then make a promise about putting things right which you mean and act on it. Again, there are at least a million books on transactional analysis, assertion, communication, integrity, emotional intelligence etc. that could be quoted here.
Okay to be wrong
In short, this has been a very simple article about a very simple taxonomy. However, as a safety professional or just as a colleague, get the above right most of the time and we’ll not be going too far wrong. Harvard Professor or not, it’s actually pretty bloody useful and important don’t you think?
In this episode of the Safety & Health Podcast, ‘Burnout, stress and being human’, Heather Beach is joined by Stacy Thomson to discuss burnout, perfectionism and how to deal with burnout as an individual, as management and as an organisation.
We provide an insight on how to tackle burnout and why mental health is such a taboo subject, particularly in the workplace.
Some great takeaways here as always from Tim Marsh
Thank you Mary – that’s very kind of you. Tim