Corporate Cultures as Precursors to Accidents
RON WESTRUM
Department of Sociology
Eastern MichiganUniversity
Design flaws occur when conscious decisions lead to unsuspected consequences. Unlike neglect, when a conscious decision is made to ignore a problem, here the problem is unseen, so no one plans for it. Design flaws are insidious, and eliminating all design flaws is very difficult. A design flaw can occur through a failure of imagination or through poor execution of a design. Any dominant factor can shape an accident for an organization, but I believe their frequency varies systematically with the corporate culture. In my previous work, I have proposed that organizational cultures can be ranged along a spectrum of information flow from pathological to bureaucratic to generative (Westrum, 1994; Turner and Pidgeon, 1997). Organizations with a pathological culture, for instance, have an atmosphere of fear and intimidation, which often reflects intense conflicts or power struggles. The bureaucratic culture, by contrast, is oriented toward following rules and protecting the organization’s “turf,” or domain of responsibility. Generative organizations are oriented toward high performance and have the most effective information flow. To me, it follows naturally from the nature of information flow in these cultures that each has particular vulnerabilities (i.e., accident precursors). For instance, a pathological environment encourages overt and covert violations of safety policies. Rogues or “cowboys” pretty much do what they want no matter what the rules are. By contrast, accidents caused by safety violations are rare in a generative environment. Furthermore, generative accidents typically do not show results associated with neglect. Overload is a possibility, but what often catches up generative organizations are design flaws, problems that have been created by conscious decisions whose consequences are not recognized until they have played out in reality. Bureaucratic organizations (most frequently represented in the “systems accident” population) typically fail because they have neglected potential problems or have taken on tasks for which they do not have the resources to do well.
I believe that these tendencies have profound consequences for dealing with accident precursors. The Reason model provides a good general approach to the problem of latent pathogens, but I believe we can do better. One implication of these special vulnerabilities is that even the nature of latent pathogens may differ from one kind of culture to another. By recognizing how cultures differ, we may have a better idea of where to look for problems. The challenge of a pathological environment is that the culture does not promote safety. In this environment, safety personnel mostly put out fires and make local fixes. The underlying problems are unlikely to be fixed, however. In fact, the pathological organizational environment encourages the creation of new pathogens and rogue behavior. The best techniques in the world can never be enough in an environment where managers practice or encourage unsafe behavior. In bureaucratic environments, the challenge is a lack of conscious awareness. In the neglect scenario, problems are present, and may even be recognized, but the will to address them is absent. Bureaucratic organizations need to develop a consciousness of common cause, of mutual effort, and of taking prompt action to eliminate latent pathogens. In an overload situation, which has a great potential for failure, the organization needs outside help to cut tasks down to a size it can handle. Groupthink is an ever-present danger in neglect or overload situations, because it can mask problems that need to be faced. Generative organizations may seem to be accident-proof, but they are not.
Generative organizations do not do stupid things, but design flaws are insidious. In the cases of violations, neglect, and overload, the environment provides clear indications to an outside analyst that something is wrong. You can measure the sickness or inefficiency of the culture by tests, observations, and analysis. For instance, there are “symptoms” of groupthink. By contrast, design flaws can be present even when a culture shows no overt symptoms of pathology. Design flaws often come from a failure of what I have called “requisite imagination,” an inability to imagine what might go wrong. Even generative cultures suffer from design flaws. In a recent paper, Tony Adamski and I have suggested how requisite imagination can be increased (Adamski and Westrum, 2003). Yet, I believe no system is really capable of predicting all negative consequences. Hence, requisite imagination is more of an art than a science. We can now look at the differences in confronting latent pathogens in the three different cultural situations. In a generative environment, pointing out (or even discovering) a latent pathogen is usually sufficient to get it fixed. Things are very different in a bureaucratic environment, where inertia or organizational commitments stand in the way of fixing the latent pathogen. When an organization has an overload problem, fixing the problem can be very difficult. In a pathological environment, pointing out a latent pathogen is personally dangerous and may result in the spotter, rather than the pathogen, getting “fixed.” I believe that knowing the specific types of failure and their typical generating conditions can help organizations eliminate latent pathogens. If pathogenic situations vary with the environment, then maybe our approach to cleaning them up ought to vary, too.
These observations are impressionistic, but they can be a starting point for further inquiry into links between organizational cultures and the dynamics of latent pathogens. Latent pathogens are constantly generated and constantly removed. Accident reports contain voluminous information about the production of latent pathogens, but we do not know enough about the processes for removing them. The characteristics of healthy environments might be a good topic for a future workshop.
REFERENCES
Adamski A., and R. Westrum. 2003. Requisite Imagination: The Fine Art of Anticipating What Might Go Wrong. Pp. 187–220 in Handbook of Cognitive Task Design, E. Hollnagel, ed. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
APPENDIX A 185
Kern, T. 1999. Darker Shades of Blue: The Rogue Pilot. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Reason, J. 1990. Human Error. Cambridge, U.K.: CambridgeUniversity Press. Turner, B.A., and N.F. Pidgeon. 1997. Man-Made Disasters, 2nded. Oxford, U.K.: Butterworth Heineman.
Westrum, R. 1994. Cultures with Requisite Imagination. Pp. 401–416 in Verification and Validation of Complex Systems: Human Factors, J. Wise et al., eds. Berlin: Springer Verlag. Westrum, R. Forthcoming. Forms of Bureaucratic Failure. Presented at the Australian Aviation Psychologists Symposium, November 2001, Sydney, Australia.