Hey everybody. Today I am going to share some thoughts on determining system induced behavior and some common discussions I find myself in when teaching human performance.
Like so much of leadership, this one is an emotional journey. On one hand, we have this great new awareness for managing safety performance that we didn’t have when I started this career. Human performance has opened my eyes, helped me look at the world in a different way, helped me become more forgiving and inspired me to believe that we can finally make major change in the amount of death we experience every year.
At the same time, I continually watch people display resistance and negative emotion when teaching this subject. Most of it revolves around the shift from blaming the worker towards the new view of systems thinking. I continually watch people struggle with this so I wanted to share some thoughts in case you are having a similar experience.
Before we get in to determining if a behavior is system induced or the fault of the worker, I want to tackle the negative emotion that comes up often in these conversations.
The one I hear the most is a person says, “I get all the systems thinking but at what point do people need to hold themselves personally accountable?”.
That was exactly how it was said to me recently. I was teaching an intro to human performance session and a student asked me that question. When he asked it, you could feel the emotion behind his words. You could hear the frustration in his tone and volume projection. He was frustrated.
There are a couple things that come to mind that influence this frustration. One is how we communicate human performance and the other is that we are asking people to challenge long held belief systems. I truly believe that we need to take extra time to address both of these issues. Especially when looking for buy-in.
The first issue is we need to recognize that we are asking people to change the way they have been thinking for years, maybe even decades. I think a lot of us are guilty of communicating the need for soon, certain, negative consequences for at-risk behavior. I know I am guilty of communicating that in the past.
“Discipline for safety violations needs to be clear and consistent no matter who you are.” I have made that statement many times in my past but that was before gaining awareness of the science of human performance. Now I know. Now I have a responsibility to tweak my communication.
At the same time, I need to be cognizant of the fact that those I communicate with have been hearing that old view for a long time. I need to take extra time to explain how some of the things we have taught in the past regarding safety management have been disproven or expanded upon.
I also need to accept that you can’t just go deliver a new class on HP and expect it to automatically erase long held belief systems that have been preached for decades. People will need time to come around. They will need time to reflect on this new view, to process this new understanding and to see the concepts at play in their own work-life experience. It won’t happen overnight. We will have to continue preaching the new view, but we need a little patience because we can’t erase 30 years of old safety management theory overnight.
The second one is how we communicate.
People tune us out. People rarely take in everything you are saying and context is everything. As messengers, we are also limited in communicating the depth of our thoughts and knowledge with spoken word. I’ve mentioned before that the average person can think 600 words per minute but only speak about 100 words per minute. So, even when we have great intent, we typically only communicate 20% of the depth of what we know.
Things get lost in translation. We mean well but we are severely limited in verbal communication. Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could communicate with telepathy and just upload everything we know to the other person’s brain? Well, we can’t. But we can improve our communications, gain awareness to what other people are hearing and then redirect.
The issue with communicating human error is that people who hear this message often think we are saying that nobody is responsible for their behavior anymore. It’s always the system that motivated the behavior and it’s never the worker’s fault…….and that is not true. But people often think that is what we are saying.
I understand why people think that way. We seem to communicate human error through a pendulum method that was hard left in the past and now we have swung the pendulum so hard to the right that what our people here is, “No one needs to be held accountable anymore”. That is not human performance thinking. Personal accountability is important.
But here’s why people misunderstand and hear that, even when we don’t intend it to be perceived that way. We have swung the pendulum so far to the right that we find ourselves saying:
“It’s the system, it’s the system, it’s the system.”
“It’s not the worker, it’s the system.”
“It’s not the workers fault, we just placed them in a situation designed to fail.”
I get why we do that. We do that because we want people to shift their thinking away from blaming the employee and focus more on the systems that influence at risk behavior. But we never mean that no at-risk behavior is the fault of the worker. We mean that most at-risk behavior is influenced by our systems.
Unfortunately, although we have great intent, our communications are often misunderstood.
When considering the research of Edward Demming and Sydney Decker, somewhere between 85-90% of the time, at-risk behavior is influenced by the workplace system. 10-15% of the time, it is the fault of the worker.
So, sometimes, it is the fault of the worker. It’s just that most of the time, or a large percentage of the time, the system is where we need to focus. But definitely not all the time.
For a lot of you, I know you are already there. You get that concept. But I think all of us can fall into that situation where we find ourselves communicating, “It’s not the worker, it’s the system”. But it is not absolute! There is no absolute when we communicate about human behavior. There are always variables.
This reminds me of line from a Star Wars movie, “Only the Sith deal in absolutes”. So, are we going to communicate like a Jedi or Darth Vader? We might want to take a note from Obi-Wan-Kenobi.
As I’ve noticed how my communications are interpreted in this human performance journey I have started communicating more about the “fault of the worker” truth. I find myself becoming more extreme with that communication like, “evil does exist”. In my last class I even mentioned atrocities like rape and molestation to reinforce the idea that there are bad people in this world. There are evil workers that purposely want to do the wrong thing, for all kinds of reasons that do not make sense, to sane people with a halfway decent morale compass.
Since so many people seem to hear that human performance means nobody is responsible for their behavior anymore, I truly believe we need to continually communicate that there are bad people in this world, it’s just that the greatest amount of at-risk behavior is influenced by the system, but definitely not all of it.
Once is not enough. If it’s a class or a meeting, nobody is listening to you 100% of the time. We need to say it over and over again, “Sometimes it is the fault o...
