Planning for Success!

Unpredictable and unexpected events often test our businesses resilience. These events affect how organisations can stretch without breaking. They test how well the business can bounce back that’s if they bounce back at all. How these events affect us heavily relies on business culture, which is the heart of any organisation. Consider some examples. It is only when we have cranes tip over, space shuttles or oil rigs explode, tires falling off vehicles, that we can see with hindsight there were clear signals and patterns we rejected, that contributed to the incident occurring. Most organisations treat near misses/hits as a measure of safety, rather than system and planning failures. Take the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion for example; many times the engineers had noticed black burn marks on the O-rings. They put this down to the O-rings safely managing and protecting the shuttle from explosion. They were then blinded to the black burn marks increasing in size.

So often we see and hear organisations strategically planning, be it business start-up, new projects or re-booting business vision, yet this is done mostly without culture in mind. Most Businesses start with trying to understand through early risk assessment, what hazards and potentials may impact their businesses before they kick off the plan? They develop contingency plans to protect themselves from worst case scenarios. Their intention is to prevent small unexpected interruptions from slowing down their business processes. People’s foresights, are very limited when trying to do this as a small group, and in most cases, we use who we believe are the ‘experts’, which are normally perceived to be at the top of the organisational chart. Organisations with healthy culture know that our foresights and anticipations are limited, they know that paper based precautions fail.  The unexpected, errors and/or surprises are difficult to foresee or predict in most circumstances, but when we become comfortable with our contingency plans we also become overconfident and blinded to the fallibility of such plans. Businesses who are committed to building resilience, and willing to engage key experts where ever they may sit in the business, not just the top of the org chart, are ones that acknowledge that culture is critical, and the heart of their organisations success. They are the businesses prepared to put money into educating and developing true business culture, to have “collective mindfulness”. When a crisis hits, they are the business that will bounce back quite quickly, yet still be mindful of what is going on. They know relying on systems and procedures alone will not save them from things going wrong.

Planning for containment differs from planning with anticipation, in that it aims to prevent unwanted outcomes after an unexpected event has occurred rather than to prevent the unexpected event itself. Most organisations have unexpected events unfold without being noticed, this means that businesses reliability critically depends on how well prepared their business culture is to be mindfully reactive to things about to go wrong.

Does your organisation have a culture that knows what to look and listen for?

Are there “tick, tick, clunk, clunks that are going unnoticed”?

Do your team members raise even the most insignificant concerns, do you pay attention to the concerns or push them away as ‘trivial issues’?     

Organisations create plans to prepare for the inevitable, pre-empt the unfavourable and control the controllable. Rational as this seems, planning has its short comings. Planners plan in steady predictable settings, they are unconsciously moved into thinking the world will unfold in a predictable manner, this is a misconception to predetermination. When people are engrossed with predetermination, there is no place for unexpected occurrences that fall outside of the realms of planning. Planning without cultural understanding can do the exact opposite of what has been intended, creating mindlessness, instead of mindful anticipation of the unexpected. Plans are built from assumptions and beliefs of how we see the world, this is what sways our expectations and biases. When our expectations are strong, they influence what we actually see, we become blinded to many things right in front of us and then we choose what we approve of and what we choose to ignore. When unexpected issues start developing it takes longer to discover what is growing. If we put our expectations on vague stimuli, with good intent we fill in the gaps, we try reading between the lines and complete the proposed picture the best way we can, this is far from being calculated or robust. We actually paint the picture the way we would expect to see it play out, and the slight issues are soon pushed under the rug, rather than understanding the ways it possibly could unfold. It is only when we have cranes tip over, space shuttles or oil rigs explode, tires falling off vehicles that we can see there are clear signals and patterns we first rejected. Most Organisations treat near misses/hits as a measure of safety, rather than system and planning failures. How does your organisation treat near misses? Do they go back to the process/plan and see what has failed?

By design, plans influence people’s perception and reduce the number of things people notice, this occurs because people predetermine the world largely into the classifications galvanised by the plan. The trivial issues gain minimal attention, and get brushed under the carpet, as we feel they are irrelevant to the plan. These issues are the actual seeds that develop into the unexpected issues, errors, and or events that create organisations unreliable functioning.

Research has shown that perception of risk varies according to life experience, cognitive bias, heuristics, memory, visual and spacial literacy, expertise, attribution, framing, priming and anchoring. In other words, risk is a human constructed sense of meaning associated with uncertainty, probability and context. For example: What one person sees as too risky, another sees it as their opportunity to grow. When planning, one could be forgiven for thinking that compliance would be much easier if it didn’t involve people. When we think systems, procedures and plans control business risks, we largely miss the heart of what truly manages business success, ‘the risk makers, risk takers’, who are you and your people.

Social arrangements give us meaning, purpose and fulfilment, they can also determine the way we make decisions and judgements. Risk is not a planning, manager or engineering problem but a business culture problem. Planning, management and or engineering approaches to risk tends to have its training and thoughts focused on objects. Whilst it is vitally important to observe what is constructed, it is not the core focus of their discipline to understand human organising, collective mindfulness and the collective unconscious in response to objects. 

When we consider culture with planning it helps us understand the following questions:

·      Why do people not obey procedures?

·      Why are people non-compliant?

·      How are our perceptions limited?

·      Why do people make poor judgments about risk?

·      How is risk recognised?

·      Why are people not motivated to better understand risk?

·      How is business perception strengthened by collective mindfulness?

Without an understanding of how social arrangements affect culture, it becomes easy just to view people who take risks as fallible and not having common sense or not being obedient. Once we have dismissed people in this way, we no longer feel compelled to understand the problem or the drivers of the problem – the label has taken away any need for further understanding. Without a better understanding of human judgment and decision-making in a social and culture context, leadership tends to support greater attentiveness to ‘more of the same’.

Peter Drucker phrase “Culture Eats Strategies for Breakfast” sums up perfectly what is wrong in so many businesses today. No matter how well thought-out the strategy is, if you don’t consider the culture in your organisation to support that strategy it will not come to fruition. Many business leaders have underestimated the power of culture and failed in their new strategies because of it. Therefore, it’s really about the two working hand-in-hand. Planning with collective cultural influence is critical to business outcomes for success. Systems are the foundation of what a business wants to achieve, which need to consider the beliefs and actions of people. People however are the drivers and action takers of systems, if not included in the development of plans and procedures can grossly miss interpret them, creating an unintentional road block before the plan gains any momentum. How is your organisation planning for success? 

 

Practice What You Preach!

When we walk into an organisation and read signs saying, ‘Everyone Home Safe, Every Day or Every Day is a Good Day to go Home Safe’, in our business, we look for how the organisation actually does this. Most times, you hear and see the traditional Leadership style which is one that has a telling notion, top order pushing down. A business should be asking themselves, are they really making sure ‘Everyone Home Safe, Every Day’? Or is this just another safety slogan with no substance?

You never seem to hear discussions of leaders asking for ideas or input from the employees. No communication on how they are going to carry out their tasks. Rarely do you hear them ask if they know a safer way to act out the job. Instead we see a leader standing there with a piece of paper dictating on how to do their job. Not often do we see workers developing their own work plan, a generic SWMS and or JSEA. Someone else gives direction to what is going into the documents. The workers appear reserved from speaking up with any valuable input. I remember on a few occasions when running safety training for workers on the Coal Seam Gas projects in QLD; I would ask “who thinks there is too much paperwork and why do they think that”? They were already flustered as the training they were about to receive was more paperwork, for observing one another’s behaviours. The added was pressure was coming from the client. Their answers were all very similar no matter what company you asked, ‘too much meaningless, ass covering paperwork, it does nothing to manage the risks we are playing with’. The workers felt that they were not heard nor asked of their thoughts with the hazards and risks. Are we really achieving safe home every day? Do we overwhelm our workforce with meaningless paper work? Should we strip back to the bare bones and engage our risk takers, risk makers? Are we truly engaging our workers and listening to the real stories?

Too often we see organisations buying into generic off the shelf programs that does not suit their true business needs, leaving them with by-products that impact on their risk management. Perhaps it is a legitimate fear of doing wrong, getting into trouble or the need for a quick fix that drives businesses to make such decisions. The issue is most of these off the shelf documents don’t encourage communication consultation, instead they sit in the office book shelf or on a computer and don’t see the light of day in the field. Organisations then think they have solved that problem and there is no need to reassess their processes in their business.

What answers would you get in your organisation if you ask this question? ‘If we strip back the policies and procedures in the workplace will it impact on the way the workers manage risk?’ Asking this question just may surprise you. We asked this question with some field based workers and the response was, “we don’t use the paperwork in the field anyway, we just tick and flick it.” They are reverting back to their own knowledge as they feel it is the safest option.  Their belief is the documents don’t have any value as they’ve been created by someone in the office who doesn’t even perform their job tasks. They couldn’t see how anyone who didn’t do their job, could consider the actions they took in the workplace. What can we do to have our workers see value in the system documents? How can we create harmony with workers and systems so they mirror reflect one another?

We believe that it is critical to have all systems and documents designed and developed with the employees in the field of work and then look how to marry it with compliance. Tailor making company systems is important, it helps keep cohesive beliefs and values towards the organisations trajectory. It also ensures if variation arises it is not so frightening to amend the document, whereas generic off the shelf documents creates the sense of rigidness and should not be changed. If we cut down on the bureaucracy and see our people as the solution and not the problem, would this influence the way risk is managed in your business?

Giving control and empowering our workers is a great way of gaining better learnings and understandings of risk in the workplace. It’s not only safety that benefits from empowering your workers. It helps with quality, efficiencies, engagement, worker compensation premiums, and more, resulting in a healthy bottom line. Seeing this approach carried out in a workplace gives you a sense of trust and belief within the organisation, a feeling of openness and honesty. Workers need to have ownership of the work and risks they are dealing with on a day to day basis for the business to be successful.

Leadership is about engaging and empowering our followers to lead. Giving them power to manage their own risk (Risk makers, Risk takers). No paperwork understands their thinking at the time and situation when risk takes place. What is your leadership creating in your Organisation? How does your leadership tackle risk management? Is your organisation practising what they preach? Is their slogan/mission statement representative of the actions in the business?

Written by

Dennis Millard