PAPod 524 - Unlocking Organizational Effectiveness with Edgar Schein

Show Transcript

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Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Free Accident Podcast. I'm Todd Conklin. How are you?

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So before I even roll out the opening credit stuff, today is a big day.

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Actually, it's part one of a two-part big day.

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Does that make sense? Probably. Enough. You know, enough. You'll be fine.

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I got to spend an entire day with Edgar Schein, and actually his son Peter was with him as well.

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And he was completely cool and kind of excited about us recording it for the

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podcast so you could hear as well.

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So that's what today's podcast is. Part one of a two-parter.

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Get ready because I think your socks are about to be blown off your legs. How's it going?

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Music.

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Hi everybody todd conklin pre-accident podcast pre-investigate

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what is this called what are we you'd think after 500 of

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these you'd know what to call pre-accident investigation podcast that's

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it yeah i can't do

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it i cannot do it so you're about to enjoy the fabulous twinings of edgar shine

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fine get ready pumpkins it's good it's really good it's it's just such a treat

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to be to be with him and to hear him talk i one of my favorites i think i've

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talked about this before in the podcast one,

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of my very favorite things to do is be with these these academics as they enter

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the twilight of their careers and is that a nice way to say that yeah that's probably the best way.

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Because they've boiled away so much of the academic crap.

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So I don't know if you know, do you know the old joke about universities?

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People are so mean to each other

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in universities because the stakes are so low. That's the joke, right?

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The funny thing about academics is they're constantly sort of,

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the system is sort of incentivized to make everybody kind of an enemy.

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And what I love, and I got to see this with Edward T. Hall and just a whole

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bunch of incredible scholars.

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Ev Rogers was just a joy. is towards the end of their academic arc,

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I'm trying to think of gentle ways to say this, as they enter the next phase

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of their career and life,

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their thinking becomes so much more clear because they've sort of spent their

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entire career boiling their ideas down to these really quite remarkable statements.

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Like Edward T. Hall said, if you want to understand another culture, make a friend.

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I mean, that's an amazing, if you think about that, my life's work ended up

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on that phrase. That's a pretty cool phrase to end with.

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Ev Rogers was completely convinced at every level that communicating with one

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another was part of a larger system that involved really the whole person.

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And so we didn't communicate just in language, but we communicated in this entire package.

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And Edgar Schein has really boiled his thinking around organizations,

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culture, and safety to a great extent.

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Two words. I'm not going to tell you what those two words are because you'll

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get to hear them. I mean, I could tell them. I know them, but I'm not going to blab them out now.

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I don't want to say spoiler alert the two words are. That'd be cheesy.

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I just want to sit back and let you hear this conversation.

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Now, we're together with the folks at Chevron, and it was so sweet of them to

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invite a bunch of us to come see this.

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And we were talking about fatalities and serious injuries, which,

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you know, is a topic we probably need to spend a lot more time specifically

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throwing away the classic industrial safety conversation, the injuries and industrial harm things.

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They're important, but talking specifically about fatalities.

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And Shahika Korkmaz, who's a dear friend of mine, invited Edgar Schein.

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And Peter, his son, came with him. They traveled together. and he spent,

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gosh, a good hour and a half. You'll see, because it's the reason it's two podcasts.

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Just kind of talking about safety and how the world works and what in fact is going on.

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And I think you're going to find this conversation to be really interesting.

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It's fun. It's really good. I think the very best thing I can do is not feed

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you more information about my exciting summer, even though it's dwindling,

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almost it's over. I mean, we're into bluegrass time right now.

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I think the best thing I can do is sit back and relax and listen with you.

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And you'll hear Edgar Schein.

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And Peter's going to jump in

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once in a while talking about safety and fatalities and serious incidents.

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So here it is, the Pre-Accident Podcast gladly welcomes Edgar Schein another

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time. Sit back, relax, and enjoy.

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But it's a good lead-in to what what we want to discuss with you today,

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Instead of, you know, giving you a detailed analysis of how to think about culture,

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I really want to think about safety and improvement and effectiveness.

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My interest in this goes way back to the earliest organization development work,

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as some of you may or may not remember, was done in the oil industry. Exxon and SOChem.

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And those companies did a lot of, they put a lot of resources into their own improvement projects.

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They funded a lot of the management T groups that were operating in those days.

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Is Blake Mouton a name that still rings anywhere?

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They had a whole program that the oil companies were using for self-development.

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So it's interesting that that is not a common name anymore to you because at

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one time it was the thing to do,

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a self-administering one-week workshop that would work its way through all the layers of the company.

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And so anyway, it started there.

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And then as I started to be a consultant with Digital Equipment Corporation,

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they didn't really have a safety problem, but they have had effectiveness problems.

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And at the same time with Sibagygi, at that time, a big chemical conglomerate

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that then became pharmaceutical and is today Novartis.

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They clearly had safety issues, particularly with drugs.

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They produced the drug that produced all these unfortunate birth problems.

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So that's a very extreme form of a safety issue when you have a product.

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Produces something very undesirable and unwarranted.

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And then I got involved with Con Edison as a consultant for over 15 years.

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And that's where I've learned the most. Because when you look at a program like

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this as an outsider and don't look at a cross-section, okay,

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what are they doing right now? What is the current program?

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If you look at this across 15 years, you see all kinds of nuances that the cross-sectional

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analysis doesn't get you.

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So that got me very interested.

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And then I got involved around the culture issue with the nuclear industry,

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both in giving talks to the people in Vienna and then becoming a member of the advisory board of INPO.

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How many of you know about INPO?

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It should probably be most of you. It's a very ingenious device for an industry

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to create its own internal development organization,

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both to measure how we're doing and to provide teams that not only measure but

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then help to improve the organization.

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So for five or more years, I heard the stories of what was going on there.

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And they all lead to, I have about six points and then some handouts. The first main point.

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It's a very simple point, and I suspect,

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I hope I'm preaching to the choir that the common element in all these safety

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and effectiveness programs is that they are all driven by the same two fundamental ideas.

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Openness and trust.

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If you look at all the safety culture lists, you'll always find openness and

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trust somewhere on that list.

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And what from our point of view, if you look at this culturally,

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they are not only the most important ones, but in a certain sense, they are the only ones.

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Because all the other things you do don't really work very well if you don't

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have people that are open with each other and that trust each other.

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So the thing I am most concerned about is that.

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We get down into the trees

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and redesign the trees and the gardens and fertilizers and burn-offs and don't

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look at the forest and realize that the forest only works because of the synergy

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between openness and trust and how people relate to each other.

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Is that okay so far? Can you agree with me on that.

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So the first thing we have to solve is the trust and the openness problem.

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So all the programs I saw in Con Ed, and every few years they had a new program,

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and the safety people said, if you don't have a new program, you lose motivation.

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And you get, That is, some of you have seen that.

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And what is lost in that is why do we need a new program every few years?

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Because there's something missing.

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There's some underlying thing having to do with openness and trust that hasn't

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gotten embedded in the culture, or else we wouldn't need a new program.

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So point one is that safety and effectiveness are fundamentally the same.

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And point two is they all hinge openness and trust.

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So the Stanford right now, we're working with the hospital and the medical school

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on a variety of lean programs and improvement programs.

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Safety isn't right now the big issue. But what are all the improvement programs

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about and the quality programs?

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They're about trust and openness.

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So this convergence of effectiveness and safety is very important to get into your head.

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You're not working safety. You're working total organizational effectiveness.

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Can you live with that? Yes. Is it taken for granted or do I have to sell it to you?

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I'm in. We're with you.

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But i i mean it is worth noting that

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the world doesn't necessarily

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see it that way you might have to prove to them

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that this is the right way for the organization to think about it

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but the world is still going to have all sorts of regulatory bodies that are

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only focused on on you know fatalities and accidents but ed's point as as organizations

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what are the benefits of thinking of them as linked, as synergistic.

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All right. So now the question that the previous speaker of everyone asking you,

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what do you want me to do and how will I know how I'm doing are really fabulous

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questions for this very point.

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So the answer from our point of view is a high level of trust and openness is

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what I want you to achieve.

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And what I want you to do to get there is to develop a different relationship

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with your teammates, your boss, and your direct reports.

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All your human contacts have to go from something that in our books we introduce as level one, two,

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or three kind of relationship, where I guess we'll give you this first handout

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to explain what we mean by a level two relationship,

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that you can't have trust and openness if you don't have the right kind of human

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relationship, particularly with your direct reports.

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The most common situation that I encountered in Con Edison,

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I was part of a group, two environmental lawyers and me that were assigned to

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work for the board on improving environmental health and safety.

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But one of the things we did was we ran a lot of focus groups of electrical workers.

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And this was in the midst of Con Edison having, they were under indictment,

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they were on probation, so they had to work on this stuff.

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They were working very hard on it. And so we would have a focus group and we would say, well,

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you have this timeout program, and so if an electrical worker is down there

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under the sidewalk and sees a problem and it's unsafe, you're supposed to call a timeout. Sure.

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Does it work? Well, most of the time it works, but there are some problems.

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Well, what's the problem?

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Well, one of the problems is I tried telling my boss about this wiring didn't

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look very safe, and I could tell that he was being polite, but he wasn't really listening.

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Something in that immediate relationship wasn't working.

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The boss wasn't listening. Or he got annoyed with me because we were having too many timeouts.

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And his unit doesn't want to have more timeouts than the other units because

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they're measuring the hell out of the timeouts.

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So the measurement system under the transparency logic, which we're going to

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keep hammering is not the same as openness.

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Under the transparency logic, that supervisor is disadvantaged by knowing that

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he's got more timeouts than some other groups, and he kind of leaks that.

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To the employee, to the point where the employee says, well,

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this doesn't look quite safe to me, but I'm not sure I ought to call yet another timeout.

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You might get mad at me.

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So openness gets undermined in the most subtle way, even in the midst of a program.

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Or maybe what the what the worker saw is a deeper problem, a fellow worker doing something unsafe.

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And it's clear that the rules are you should report that.

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And in the focus groups, they would tell us, no way.

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You know, we're unionized. There is no way I'm going to report on a buddy.

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Just forget about it. That's not in the cards. Ain't going to happen.

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So again, what's the relationship between those two employees that would make

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them tolerate unsafe behavior because of another norm that's operating there?

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You never rat on a buddy. It's a very deep sort of a norm.

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So we've got to find a way to redefine the daily relationship between every

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boss and every direct report and every team member and the other team members.

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And the way we're doing that conceptually is to say the history of management

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has been way too focused on roles and role distance,

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that everyone has their job.

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They know what the job is. It's well described in the job description.

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And I'm your boss. My job is to supervise you.

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And I don't really want to get to know you. That might be uncomfortable.

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And yet getting to know you might be the only way to openness and trust.

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That's the big message. And it's a very difficult message because I think we're

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fighting all of management history.

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Management history is wedded to the idea of roles, role relations.

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You know your job. I know my job.

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Let's not get too personal here because then it might lead to nepotism.

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It might lead to other bad things.

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So what we're trying to describe in that handout is how level two differs from,

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from both a really negative relationship, what we call minus one,

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or the traditional role-based management

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relationship that I think most companies just

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buy into willy-nilly and not saying we want you to be intimate and saying there

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is a level of knowing who you're working with relevant to the job that you're

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doing that you have to achieve if safety, effectiveness.

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Openness, trust are your goal.

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And the reason for that is the work has gotten too complicated.

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You can't define roles so neatly anymore.

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Back in the assembly line day, you could do that.

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But when you look at what, like General McChrystal's team of teams,

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when he says, you know, when you're fighting that war in Afghanistan,

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you don't even know what the right roles are until you're out there.

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Or another better example even is we've done a lot of work with forestry department.

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When you're out there fighting these fires, the roles are constantly shifting.

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The work is constantly shifting. So what you really need to know is what's your buddy doing right now?

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And if the buddy is also my boss and we don't have a level two relationship,

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I don't know whether I can trust him.

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And he or she doesn't know whether they can tell me what's really going on.

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So we're pushing this concept. And it's a tricky one because it's so against management norms.

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Psychological distance is a good thing. You don't want to fraternize.

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You don't want to have to hurt your buddy and rat on him.

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And yet, the world is going into a set of tasks and structures and work situations that,

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where the roles are shifting and unclear, and even hierarchy is beginning to

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be unclear, how to manage hierarchy.

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So if we're heading into that world, I think we have a solid argument that you've

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got to somehow get to know your people at a deeper level than what is currently

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the normal management process.

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How do you react to that?

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Dr. Strong, you said transparency is not the same as openness.

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So in this situation, I think I'm going to use those words interchangeably,

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but they're not at a stake.

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Transparency is usually a management-directed set of numbers that we all should look at.

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We should make it clear what work we're doing and how we're measuring it.

00:21:16.101 --> 00:21:20.781
We're not going to hide the ball, right? We're going to share every metric.

00:21:21.381 --> 00:21:29.001
We might even share all of the performance measures of every single employee

00:21:29.001 --> 00:21:30.761
because we're completely transparent.

00:21:31.121 --> 00:21:35.921
But that's as much of a weapon as it is. It doesn't need necessarily create openness.

00:21:36.121 --> 00:21:41.661
No, I think that sort of weaponizes information, you know,

00:21:41.881 --> 00:21:50.501
because you end up with all of these sort of pathologies when you believe that

00:21:50.501 --> 00:21:53.721
that is going to really deeply influence performance.

00:21:54.781 --> 00:21:58.121
It creates new ways of hiding the ball.

00:21:59.421 --> 00:22:04.201
Because oftentimes, and again, And this is mostly speaking out of Silicon Valley,

00:22:04.421 --> 00:22:08.401
where there have been tons of experiments of this kind of thing,

00:22:08.521 --> 00:22:10.401
you know, the transparent organization.

00:22:11.481 --> 00:22:16.861
But it's a different philosophy, and it tends to be driven from the top down.

00:22:17.021 --> 00:22:21.461
We will be transparent. It's sort of cascaded down through the organization.

00:22:21.761 --> 00:22:27.561
That's quite different than openness. And we'll get into it more,

00:22:27.781 --> 00:22:34.901
unless should we? No, I think let's push on with examples.

00:22:35.281 --> 00:22:43.781
I mean, the example I gave you of the electrical worker ending up saying,

00:22:43.781 --> 00:22:48.001
there's no point telling my boss, that's a loss of openness.

00:22:48.501 --> 00:22:56.721
Openness is when every employee down in the trenches who sees something that ought to be attended to.

00:22:58.481 --> 00:23:04.221
Feels psychologically safe to go to somebody and say, I'm a little worried this

00:23:04.221 --> 00:23:09.481
valve doesn't feel quite the same way, you know, as it usually does.

00:23:10.461 --> 00:23:16.661
Openness is creating an environment where that employee will say, well, I'm not sure.

00:23:16.981 --> 00:23:21.301
It's a weak signal, but I think I ought to tell somebody.

00:23:22.304 --> 00:23:28.124
That's what's missing, isn't it, in most safety programs, that willingness of

00:23:28.124 --> 00:23:32.864
everyone to point to things that might be going wrong.

00:23:33.264 --> 00:23:40.964
Because that's what often the accident review discovers, that there were all

00:23:40.964 --> 00:23:42.304
kinds of little signals.

00:23:42.784 --> 00:23:48.204
Somebody saw something that they didn't bother to mention. And had they mentioned

00:23:48.204 --> 00:23:50.124
it, the whole chain would have been different.

00:23:50.564 --> 00:23:56.824
At least in the nuclear situation, for them, that's critical.

00:23:57.224 --> 00:24:01.364
They can't afford to have anything anywhere not be mentioned.

00:24:01.504 --> 00:24:09.764
But even there, it's hard to teach everybody that it's okay to waste time to

00:24:09.764 --> 00:24:13.884
tell stuff that might be a very irrelevant, weak signal.

00:24:13.884 --> 00:24:21.824
So, where it comes down to where this level two relationship is most important

00:24:21.824 --> 00:24:26.704
and most missing, by the way, is in middle management.

00:24:27.084 --> 00:24:35.344
Because middle management is living in a world of schedules.

00:24:36.084 --> 00:24:39.104
Productivity, career competition.

00:24:39.104 --> 00:24:46.904
And so no matter how much the board and senior management says we really are

00:24:46.904 --> 00:24:48.924
concerned about safety,

00:24:48.924 --> 00:24:58.304
I could tell talking to middle managers that that was not really their daily reward system.

00:24:58.544 --> 00:25:03.324
Their daily reward system was not how many employees told them problems.

00:25:03.544 --> 00:25:07.344
Their daily reward system was whether they got the job done or not.

00:25:07.344 --> 00:25:13.484
So the schedule, and if you look at all the big accidents, all the Challenger

00:25:13.484 --> 00:25:21.744
and so on, it was schedule that was overriding the data that some of the engineers were providing.

00:25:22.204 --> 00:25:27.784
They had the data that the O-rings might freeze up, but the politics and the

00:25:27.784 --> 00:25:33.864
schedule and the reward system were at that point not about absolute safety.

00:25:33.864 --> 00:25:41.584
They were about, let's try it out anyway, because politically we'll run the risk.

00:25:41.724 --> 00:25:48.964
And the most terrifying thing I hear is when a hospital director or a senior

00:25:48.964 --> 00:25:55.684
executive says, well, you know, a few fatalities are just the price of doing business.

00:25:56.184 --> 00:26:00.124
And they're not talking about OSHA statistics, they're talking about fatalities.

00:26:01.995 --> 00:26:07.855
They inevitably develop a mentality that, well, it's going to happen anyway.

00:26:07.855 --> 00:26:11.495
It's too difficult to get fatalities to zero.

00:26:11.995 --> 00:26:16.295
So we'll adapt and do what's next best.

00:26:16.775 --> 00:26:20.715
We'll be more efficient. But the minute you say,

00:26:20.915 --> 00:26:26.715
but are you more effective in the long run, then you begin to see,

00:26:26.875 --> 00:26:38.975
well, maybe the price of that fatality in terms of lawsuits and immoral behavior was not worth it.

00:26:39.255 --> 00:26:44.635
Maybe some companies should go bankrupt if they have too many fatalities.

00:26:45.155 --> 00:26:50.135
So level two is the answer.

00:26:50.335 --> 00:26:56.295
And the question then becomes, what would it take to get that middle manager.

00:26:57.035 --> 00:27:06.055
To create a climate for the direct reports and his fellow middle managers with

00:27:06.055 --> 00:27:09.375
whom he or she is competing for career goodies?

00:27:09.575 --> 00:27:16.635
What would it take for them to create psychological safety for their subordinates?

00:27:16.975 --> 00:27:24.855
The answer is their boss has to institute it in them, which means that their

00:27:24.855 --> 00:27:27.055
boss has to institute it in them.

00:27:27.475 --> 00:27:36.055
So the only answer in the long run is if from the very top you buy into the level two idea.

00:27:37.203 --> 00:27:45.523
Then make it part of the reward system of the organization, not a concept,

00:27:45.943 --> 00:27:47.663
part of the reward system.

00:27:51.683 --> 00:27:55.483
So what do you think? That's part one. Okay. That's only part one.

00:27:55.603 --> 00:27:58.063
Now, I don't know how much I need to describe or explain.

00:27:58.183 --> 00:28:01.243
You'll have to kind of tell me in the comments, but when he talks about level

00:28:01.243 --> 00:28:05.763
negative one, those are managers with no relationship to their people.

00:28:05.763 --> 00:28:09.903
Level zero is kind of the classic professional relationship.

00:28:10.343 --> 00:28:15.343
Level one is a much more personal relationship, understanding and knowing the

00:28:15.343 --> 00:28:17.643
whole person, family, kids, et cetera, et cetera.

00:28:18.003 --> 00:28:23.563
Level two is an intimate relationship. That's probably different than what we're talking about.

00:28:23.783 --> 00:28:28.583
So those are kind of the levels he sets up. What's interesting is how he's really

00:28:28.583 --> 00:28:37.183
talking about relationship building and how our classic sort of industrial age,

00:28:37.903 --> 00:28:44.083
Frederick Taylorism understanding of relationship building has been very separate

00:28:44.083 --> 00:28:49.063
and very sterile and how wrong that is and how it impacts the ability to create

00:28:49.063 --> 00:28:54.583
really this idea of trust and confidence. And those are the big words.

00:28:54.703 --> 00:28:57.303
That's kind of, that's my word, but we can, we can deal with it from there.

00:28:57.463 --> 00:29:01.563
That's part one. I bet you can't even wait for next week and yet you'll have

00:29:01.563 --> 00:29:03.683
to. I know it's, I'm a trickster.

00:29:03.903 --> 00:29:08.423
It sucks. That's it. You guys, part one is over. Part two is coming up. This is it.

00:29:08.823 --> 00:29:11.823
Have as much fun as you possibly can. Learn something new every single day.

00:29:11.963 --> 00:29:15.903
I know you did today. And for goodness sakes, you guys be safe.

00:29:16.720 --> 00:29:25.922
Music.