HRO 9e Collision at Sea-Sequence of Events4, Value Conflicts2

This is the second of two posts that uses the sequence of events to examine value conflicts associated with Highly Reliable Organizing.

References

(a) Navy Report of the Collision https://www.doncio.navy.mil/FileHandler.ashx?id=12011.

In my previous post about value conflicts that arise in High Reliability Organizing (HRO), I described some actions worth considering if you disagree with the Risk Management Plan of your superiors. These are almost never discussed in organizations. Speaking with a senior member of the organization about something you think is wrong (or is about to be) is never easy. It takes considerable moral courage, which I was taught at the Naval Academy could be summed up as “doing what’s right regardless of the personal consequences.” In this post, I consider how one might prepare for the inevitable ethical dilemmas that occur in High Reliability Organizing and offer some thoughts about disagreeing with the boss.

Preparation for Ethical Dilemmas

There are at least four things to ask yourself before you are faced with an important professional dilemma with career implications. “Before” is the key word here. It is really hard to think clearly in the middle of a situation when the stakes are high and you are feeling a lot of pressure and stress. Very few people make good decisions under stress.

First, who is asking you to accept the risk or perform an action you deem unwise or even unethical? If a friend asks you to do something that you believe is wrong, are they the kind of friend you want to keep? This kind of request is easy to refuse as long as you value your reputation more than friendship. Second, do you honestly believe a post hoc claim like “I recommended against it” will absolve you of responsibility? It’s possible, but not likely based on the investigation reports I’ve read. When you are responsible for safe navigation and operations (like the OOD), “the boss told me to do it” isn’t going to help you. Third, are other people in the organization depending on you to make the right choice to keep them safe? This might help you decide that the consequences of your decision don’t just affect you personally. Fourth, is your paycheck more important than your reputation and honor? Is being fired worse than giving away your integrity?

When you are at the end of “the long green table,”* it will be just you and the Board members. Your chain of command will not be there to defend you. You will be alone explaining your actions so make sure you can. You have no control over after the fact judgments of the Board members who often have an institutional imperative to identify blameworthy candidates. You only have control of your conduct *before* the investigation. Once you accept this reality, try not to let it bother you. It is just the way things are.

* This is a Navy metaphor for being questioned in conjunction with a formal inquiry (yes, it happened to me).

As I got promoted to positions of increasing responsibility and risk, the stakes for ethical decisions increased as well. A senior officer once told me, “If you haven’t been ‘almost’ fired more than once, you’ve never had a real job.” I used to ask myself the four questions all the time. I tried to imagine how tests of my integrity and professional judgment might occur and my options for responding. I prefer not to dwell on really bad things and disasters (well, maybe a little), but I believe that imagining how others would judge the potential consequences of my decisions made it less difficult for me to do the right thing when the pressure was high.

I share two observations from my personal experience related to disagreeing with the boss.

Disagreeing with the Boss (when it wasn’t me)

First, I wrote a letter challenging the CO’s decision once. The stakes were lower than collision at sea. I resigned from a voluntary position because I argued that the decision made by the CO was not ethical. I probably didn’t use the word “unethical” in my letter, however. Remember my point from the prior post about not backing your boss into a corner where he loses face. I suffered no career impacts for writing the letter, but there could have been. I decided before writing the letter that I could accept being fired for doing what I thought was honorable.

Second, far safer than telling the boss “I think you’re wrong” is to frame your concern as a question. “I don’t understand …” or “I am confused by ...” are good ways to start. You may actually have a knowledge gap or be framing the risk differently from your boss. If not, you may nudge your boss closer to ethical behavior. Not many people are comfortable saying “I think we should lie to Congress” out loud.

The important thing is that you may be given or asked to participate in an unsafe or unethical order someday. It might be a good idea to consider what you will do before it happens. Just as I learned to do, you may be able to imagine professional dilemmas based on the nature of your job: being asked to cover up an error, take a test for someone else, or submit false reports. It might be your friend or the boss that asks you to do these things. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you prepare yourself for the situation and decisions you will have to make because the “wolf always comes” (Aesop, 2016).

* Aesop, A. (2016). The shepherd’s boy and the wolf in Aesop's fables. Xist Publishing. Retrieved from https://mindsplain.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Aesops-Fables-by-Aesop.pdf

Disagreeing with the Boss (when it was me)

I worked at making it easy for people to share concerns with me. When you are very senior, it is much harder for people to relate to you as an individual. Even if you tell people that you accept criticism and questions about your decisions, they might not believe you. This is especially true if you have a track record of responding aggressively and angrily to criticism (this is often called “shooting the messenger” that brings bad news). React badly to your daughter’s first boyfriend and you will never get to meet the second.*

* Anecdote courtesy of Dr. Todd Conklin. Conklin, T. (2019). The 5 principles of human performance. PreAccident Media.

Senior leaders have to create the psychological safety and sense of duty necessary for people to come forward even with weak ideas of problems.In many disasters, the people in charge are told multiple times of impending doom and they brush off the warnings. In other situations, someone has really important information that they don’t share because they assume they are wrong or others already know it. Or they think they will be ridiculed for coming forward, possibly because they have seen it happen to somebody else. I didn’t want either to happen.

Some of the things I did to create safety for disagreeing with me:

* Ask, ask, ask for feedback. Do it many different ways because you might not get it the first time.

* Seek out the people you find most difficult to work with or trust the most to be brutally honest with you. They are likely to be the least intimidated about giving you bad news.

* Get good at reading facial expressions and then asking for more information. Often, recognizing an odd look on someone’s face was my only indication of a problem before doing something unwise (or stupid).

* Before deciding a course of action, ask people to describe their perception of the risks. Don’t argue with them. Ask “Why do you see it that way?” more than once.

* Do lots of training in which you use examples of what people knew before things went wrong and who they might have told. Compelling, dramatic stories are very powerful ways to emphasize what you expect from people.

* If you hold a meeting to review risks and no one mentions any or has any misgivings, stop the meeting and tell them to come back when they do.

* Never, ever shoot the messenger for telling you something you don’t want to hear. Reward each messenger publicly to send the message that you appreciate and encourage negative views.