A dialogue in a recent Latent Cause Experience seminar will have me thinking for a long time. We were discussing two of the principles of Latent Cause Analysis:
When something goes wrong, no-one is allowed to blame anyone. Instead, all involved are required to look at themselves.
I had thought that this principle would encourage the ultimate in personal accountability. Even the blamers ought to realize that they would get what they wanted -- the people that “did it” would be admitting their own roles. I learned that this was not good enough for some people.
The second principle is known as the Golden Rule of a Latent Cause Analysis, which states: We will try to understand why people did what they did to such an extent we’re convinced we’d have done the same thing if we were that person.
I had thought that this principle would help people put themselves in another person’s shoes before they jumped to quickly into the blaming frame of mind. I learned that this is also not good enough for some people.
One of the seminar attendees, a manager, objected to these principles saying that he wanted the option to punish someone if he thought it appropriate. I countered his objection by asking:
If you thought you might have done the same thing if you were the person you wanted to punish, would you still want to punish him?
Yes! Just because I’d have done the same thing doesn’t make it right! I thought to myself, “well that’s not a bad point!”
Well then, how would you feel if the person you wanted to punish admitted his error, and even suggested his own “punishment?”
That’s not good enough. I want to be the one that imposes the punishment.
The discussion digressed into a fictional scenario. Another seminar attendee said: Let’s suppose someone did not follow a procedure, and because he omitted a few steps something awful happened and a person actually died. Let’s also suppose the “culprit” admitted his role. Even more, let’s suppose the person quit his job, and even walked into a jailhouse and locked himself behind bars for 30 years. Would this be good enough?
The manager said “no, that’s not good enough.” I would want to be the one that hurts him for what he did.
I’m not too sure I know what to make of this, but my “gut” doesn’t like it.
What do you think? What does this say about the human condition? Are we all like this? If not, how many are like this? Even more, what does it say about the hopes of learning from things that go wrong? So many questions.
Please share your thoughts below!
18 comments:
Id say the person is a candidate for coaching, if not counseling. It sounds like they are after vengeance, not justice. It goes back to making sure our motives are pure and principled before we take action.
It is not our roles to be counselors, nor is it the goal of the LCA method to heal.
When we "understand why people did what they did to such an extent we’re convinced we’d have done the same thing if we were that person", but still demand punishment and the right to punish, we're reacting to what happened to us in the past, most likely when we were children.
This brings up an interesting consideration: How do we deal with psychological issues that arise when we as professionals triggered that event by means of the questions we ask as part of the LCA.
There's no easy answer.
Mike,
As I see it and teach it, LCA exists for one reason, and that reason is to understand. I do think it's possible for a human being to make a distinction between "understanding" and "what to do about that understanding." It seems that we (humans) get into trouble mostly because we jump to the 2nd part (what do do) before we truly get to the 1st part (understanding). When LCA practitioners continually emphasize that "we're here to understand," that always helps because it always takes people beyond where they normally would go. LCA, like life itself, is a journey -- it always leads us beyond where we are.
Robert, Its always good to hear from you !. I always start the RCA kick off meetings and any subsequent RCA related meeting or conversation with " we want to try and fully understand what happened and why it happened" Working with multi cultural workforces is as you well know from your trips into asia can be an extremely challenging group of individuals fiercley protective of losing their jobs and livelihoods.To try and open them up to the concept of "understand" but once you manage to break this barrier and they realise that you are seeking "understanding" for the good of all parties and their own families then they open up their hearts to you,their fears are allayed.Whatever actions are to be taken will be accepted and taken constructively.Even if the severity or attitude of the involved person/s leads to termination of a particular individual the group will accept this as they do not want to be exposed to a repeat potential during their day to day operations. We started with a no blame culture many years ago to create an atmosphere of trust, now over time our people have moved towards accepting and expecting some forms of discipline to be part of the action plans.
This is a very thought provoking topic. One that I personally wish I could participate in first hand.
I think a large percentage of society is this way. Many people want to "throw the switch" as it were. The people who carry out executions and their feelings about that have always intrigued me.
Who would this manager say should punish him? If he agrees that he would have done the same thing, he is admitting that he WAS part of the problem. So what form and amount of the punishment should he receive?
Bret,
I tend to think that the mindset here is this:
"I agree that I would have done the same thing IF I WERE THAT PERSON, but I am NOT that person, and people like that ought to be punished, and I would be delighted and even would desire to apply the punishment."
I think the above mindset is borderline "sick," and demonstrates a very unsympathetic view of life. Speaking for myself, I feel so very fortunate to have been born of the parents that bore me, raised in a "Leave it to Beaver" family, exposed to healthy and good people most of my life, etc. It could have been so much different.
Without devolving to psyco-analysis, this hostility is sometimes rooted in the manager feeling betrayed by the offenders action. Maybe the manager is a reformed micro-manager (like me) who resisted that tendency, and, in this case, and had horrible results. In any case, the impetus to stop this in the LCA has to come from the guys supervisor or above. As you stress, the buy-in has to be from the top. The example is way over the top and tends to miss the broader destruction to the process caused by the corrosiveness of this attitude. I, way more often, encounter the tendency of those in my company wanting to blame and then punish a vendor or contractor using this same mindset. As you can imagine, the fear of this makes it hard to even convince these folks to participate. The principalinvestigator can shut this down in the stakeholders meeting but only if he has immediate and unequivocal backing from upper management in that meeting. This means that the PI has to have seen it and made sure he has some "firepower" at the meeting.
The role of a manager is not to punish (especially not to hurt) but to correct and ensure the safety and well being of the people in our charge and those they effect. Any action we take should be done to correct a problem or behavior, not as punishment or retribution. If we find that we are not looking at the situation in this way we should pass the item to someone who can.
Robert, Early in my chemical manufacturing career I was monitoring a complex process using a newly installed process control system. An erroneous temperature reading caused by a failed transmitter resulted in the loss of an entire batch. During the incident review the process manager, the process chemical engineer, and the plant electrician all agreed I was not at fault and even a more experienced operator would have followed the same troubleshooting steps I had taken However, the building supervisor kept repeating that he felt the operator, me in this case and I was sitting right there even though he kept referring to me in the third person, had failed to do his job. If the rest of the review committee had acquiesced to this supervisor, then my employment would have been terminated on the spot. They held their positions and ultimately the reason for the transmitter failure was identified, protocols were implemented to avoid similar events, and I got to keep my job. Years later I became a principal incident investigator for the company and that first experience gave me true empathy for the person at the crux of an investigation. The answer to your question is no, we are not all like the vindictive supervisor. The fact there are people like him in the workplace is the very reason for a formalized review process and a team approach to investigate when things go wrong.
It seems to me there is a similarity between the mechanisms of criminal law and the attitude of this manager. In criminal law the guilty person is punished for what he has done by the society. People say this is for the benefit of this wrongdoer, but that is not true. It is often demonstrated that the behavior of the criminal will not improve by going to prison, even if the general comment of the public is: ‘ah, that will teach him!’ In reality the punishment is to satisfy the society who has a need to be compensated for the damage it has suffered. The same goes for this company and this manager I guess. The company has a need to be compensated for unregular and damaging behavior of its employees, to ‘set an example’ the employee should be punished, but I do not believe that this attitude will bring the company closer to the truth.
Jan,
Personally, I DO think there's a place for punishment in society and business. For a simple example, if someone runs a stop-light and a policeman sees the infraction, the person who runs a stop-light ought to get a ticket (punishment). I see nothing wrong with this, and in fact think it has to happen. We have laws and rules for a reason, and when they are broken there MUST be a consequence. We, by nature, seem to like "breaking the rules," and we WILL break them if we think we can.
The question raised by this post is a bit different. The "manager" in this case wanted to be the one who imposed the punishment, EVEN THOUGH THE PERSON THAT DID IT imposed the same punishment on THEMSELVES.
In the above example (the guy that ran a stop-light), it'd be like saying "it's not good enough that he gave himself a ticket -- I want to be the one who gives the ticket!"
Robert, I think you answered your own question about the human condition and the prevalence of this attitude among us human beings. It appears this is the first time you have encountered an attendee this focused on personally being an instrument of punishment. If that is true and considering the number of people you have contacted in your training career, he is an anomaly rather than an indicator of a shared belief. I also think he is confusing the unintended detrimental consequences of an action or behavior on the part of a worker, and the intended consequences of someone who commits a crime. Workers deserve an opportunity to be corrected, retrained, or if necessary relieved of duty if there is evidence they will repeat the action or continue to exhibit the behavior. The criminal is rightfully punished for intentional acts that materially or physically harm others. The attendee seeks to be judge, jury, and “executioner”, but not a leader of his employees. As a side note, society’s demand for prison terms isn’t based solely on extracting compensation as Jan noted, but it also serves to separate the individual from society to prevent future victims from suffering a similar or worse fate. A caring society protects its members from predators.
I think a common thread in all these replies is that the feeling of retribution is personal, not professional. I appreciate Mr. Cope for sharing his personal story, which in my mind had an appropriate outcome. I also agree with Mr. Swanson's perspective regarding intent. "One strike and you're out" is inappropriate not only for management of people in general, but the LCA process in particular, barring special circumstances.
Illusion of being human (soon I'll publish my book almost completed but still has some reasons to com
I really don't wish to be the guy that is always bringing up "that one particular topic" but, this is an excellent case in which to apply Just Culture. The very concept of a fair and CONSISTENT form of punitive accountability is the void that Just Culture seeks to fill. I find the concept fits hand in hand with the high-minded concepts of LCA.
Too often managers seeking to mete out justice, have a secondary agenda. This leads to the doling out of vengeance wearing the mask of the hijacked virtue justice. If a systems approach to both Safety and Accountability were installed, the use of moral constructs, such as justice, would not come from a place of ego, but instead, come from the system itself. This leads to employees projecting yet another moral construct: Faith. Faith that the management has their welfare and fair treatment in mind.
Very interesting post, Joby. I do have a followup question. You are suggesting that Justice can come from the "system itself," rather than from humans whose egos might often lead justice astray.
Here's my question: Can't those same human egos create systems that generate awful forms of "justice?" In fact, isn't that what most of our organizations have already done? Haven't our HR, and other policies "systematized" the meting out of punishment instead of justice?
In other words, that same "ego" that wanted to lash out and "hurt" another human being is the same "ego" that develops our systems.
Honesty, I tend to think that most of us are like this manager (subject of this post) that everyone is poncing-on. I don't think we want to be like him, but I think we all have some of that "him" in us.
Bob, no doubt most, if not everyone, has some of that “him” lurking within. I suggest there are two aspects to it, how much “him” is present and how well it is controlled. We could construct a scale that ranges from Mother Teresa to Hitler in which people are rated for level of “himness”. If it was possible to place individuals on the scale, I believe that over time we would observe each one moving up or down in rating due to age, experience, circumstances and a host of other factors. The system of justice each of them might create would run the gamut from nearly the same to radically different when compared with other systems. So, yes, the ego has an effect on justice, but that does not condemn those systems to be universally punitive.d
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