We wrap up the 3 part Accountability series by covering counterfactuals and how they impact our view of people or system problems, the role of a culpability matrix, and how to create a high accountability environment.
(Transcript Start)
[00:00:00] spk_0: This is Andy and this is Matt and you're listening to
[00:00:03] spk_1: the Hop podcast with no name. What a dumb
[00:00:07] spk_0: name. So stupid.
[00:00:23] spk_1: And we're off episode nine, take three of accountability. We're gonna, we're going to really get into it this time. We've gotten into it every time. So we're gonna, we're gonna do the same thing we do. We're going to surprise you and talk about homework first. That'll really throw you off your listening game,
[00:00:41] spk_0: right? What was the homework? The last time the
[00:00:43] spk_1: homework was to take an event and an event where you, where the result was punishment and you agree with that result and to look and see if you can describe what happened without using counterfactual in that event. So, can I describe what happened without saying things like, well, the person should have uh and didn't uh they decided they didn't need to whatever you want to say, a counterfactual in that event analysis. And to just think about if you in hindsight are defining it with counterfactual,
[00:01:19] spk_0: got it. OK. So I did, I did the homework. Did you do your Yeah. Well,
[00:01:27] spk_1: my homework is different than your homework actually. A different plan.
[00:01:32] spk_0: So I, I thought about an event that was happened in my world when I was an environmental health and safety leader. And it was probably the first time that I really, really, really struggled with this idea of breaking a cardinal rule and not knowing how to address it. And it was when we had a person using gloves. Um, and they were using gloves while operating in end mill, which is a big, big, no, no in the world that I came from so much so that like we had signs on all of the pieces of equipment that had rotating pieces that said do not wear gloves on this piece of equipment. So it was like, it was considered one of the cardinal rules of the site.
[00:02:22] spk_1: And for not me, obviously, uh, but for others who may not know what an End Mill is, I mean, I've heard this story so I had to secretly look it up and not tell you. But, um,
[00:02:35] spk_0: I mean, just picture picture a rotating like drill bit if you haven't seen an end mill before. And, and what had happened is that the glove had gotten caught on this rotating part of the equipment and then the person's hand got pulled in, they grabbed for it with their other hand, their other hand got pulled in and, um, they had serious damage done. So they had a couple of fingers amputated and a tendon removed and all of their fingers were broken, the ones that remained. And so I actually went to the hospital right after this event. So I know, I know no context, right? If it had the, the only thing that I saw is actually I went into the room where this event had happened right before I left for the hospital. And I saw the End Mill and I saw, um, the gloves and bits of human, um, wrapped around it. And that's all I knew. And then I went to the hospital and, um, and I can tell you that my first thought when I saw him, uh and I saw that he was missing two fingers and I saw how much damage had been done. Uh The only thing I could think is, well, that's, that's why this rule exists like you, you broke this cardinal rule and, and, and that's what happens when you break a cardinal rule. I mean, I felt empathetic for sure, but at the same time, my brain was screaming, that's why the rule exists. And in my world, historically, cardinal rules like this, you probably would be removed from your job if you could continue to do your job, which it was not clear whether or not this person could even continue to do the job that they had been hired for because of how much damage was done to their hands. It's like a one
[00:04:22] spk_1: strike policy. You make one mistake like this Yeah.
[00:04:26] spk_0: Well, yeah. And it was just so hard because, like, the one strike was like, disfiguring for, I mean, like, totally changed the course of his life. But then on top of it we also had, um, a fairly strict policy of cardinal rules being broken and the disciplinary action that would come from that in order to try to set precedence as to, you know, that it's not ok, this is not a, not an OK thing to do. Um, which in hindsight, clearly not OK. Right. For this human did not need somebody to bring a rule in place. They had already suffered ultimate consequences for this scenario. Um But luckily at the time that this event happened, I was at the stage of being able to do some amount of operational learning in my world and in my job. And um, what I focused on was actually that rule and I focused on learning whether or not that rule had operational fidelity. And so I talked to a lot of people that worked in that shop, um, and asked them about this rule of not wearing gloves around rotating equipment and whether or not it was feasible to follow workable. Did it make sense? And I was told so many exceptions to the rule that I, I don't even remember how many, um, it became really, really clear that this rule looked really good on paper. And in practice, it was not followed most of the time because the consequences of not, of following it were actually, in some cases, immediate, maybe not higher than the consequences of, of not following it. But, um, you know, there were places where you would get cut or you would get burned or you would, you know, you'd have other reasons why it made a ton of sense to be wearing gloves. And the chance of you feeling like you could have catastrophic failure felt low enough that the tradeoff for each individual was, hey, if I don't wear these gloves, I am like, I'm absolutely going to get cut. And if I do wear the gloves, you know, I won't get cut and I'm just going to have to make sure I'm extra careful not to get my hands caught in whatever I'm working on
[00:06:31] spk_1: or try to remember every single time to take them off, put the Mecca and take them off at me.
[00:06:37] spk_0: Yeah, especially if you're going back and forth between a job that, you know, you needed gloves for part of it and then you're using rotating equipment for the another part. I always remember, never forget to take them on and off, on and off, on and off. So at first, I could not describe that event without using counterfactual. He should not have been wearing gloves and he was wearing gloves. And that's the reason the event happened after learning about the event and learning about all the rest of these exceptions. Not only I can explain exactly why he was wearing gloves, he was working with sharp metal and he was actually going back and forth and back and forth working with that sharp metal and using this piece of equipment. Um And I can also explain lots of different variations of other places in which people, it made logical sense. And so we ended up not focusing on trying to enforce that rule. We ended up looking at mitigation efforts. And in this case, um specifically, uh Ford and the UAW had created um a pair of gloves that had tear away fingers like a couple of years before this event had occurred. And in operational learning, um that type of idea had come up from the operators that did this work and we were able to Google whether or not these types of gloves existed. And very thankfully, they did already exist because the UAW and Ford had already gone through the process of inventing them and getting them into the market. It's a lot to learn.
[00:07:57] spk_1: I mean, yeah, you go from counterfactual to OK, we're gonna buy new gloves. I didn't know existed to hopefully make this, not never happen again because it would be a perfect world, but the damage would be less severe if it does happen again and give people the tools they need to be
[00:08:13] spk_0: right? Just acknowledging that the rule itself, although it seemed great on paper was, did not have operational fidelity. And so if that's true, then we need to look at some other type of change we can make. And in this case, mitigation for the type of P pe we were wearing and having gloves with, you know, tear away fingers, allow if you do get it stuck in anything that the fingers of the glove rip away instead of the fingers of your hand.
[00:08:37] spk_1: But it's very easy to be somewhat satisfied with how you started before you got this thought about counterfactual. And the, and the, I think you did a learning team to figure out more, uh, where it's like, well, the rule is you don't wear gloves. This person was wearing gloves and they actually defeated his safety on top of that with the guarding, right.
[00:08:58] spk_0: In this case, they had removed the guarding
[00:09:00] spk_1: and, and so that's why they got hurt. That's, I mean, you put it on paper
[00:09:06] spk_0: like
[00:09:07] spk_1: that. All that is correct too.
[00:09:09] spk_0: Nothing you're saying is wrong. So,
[00:09:12] spk_1: what, what are we going to do about it? We remind everyone right? Or we, we just think we have a bad apple and we have someone who, you know, they're a person problem and this is what they, this is what they do and they're doing it with their gloves. They're probably also doing it with like when they clock out of their lunch break or whatever they're doing, they're trying to find these little ways where they can just disobey these rules and there's this big person problem and that's over simplifying everything. But we, we tend to think that maybe it's just, yeah, it's just this person.
[00:09:43] spk_0: And so ultimately, I mean, what we want to be able to get to is removing ourselves from the, this sort of terrible catch 22 that we're in. Um, meaning that right now for, in most places when we have an event, we do recognize the need to try to figure out do we have a person problem or do we have a system problem? But unfortunately, the process to understand if we have a person problem or a system problem requires learning, which requires learning directly from the folks that theoretically in the process of learning. If we're still trying to figure out if punishment is the right thing to do that we are trying to have them teach us if they are a person problem, which just no matter how you slice it, it, it, it doesn't work well. Um You can't have folks feel like they can speak openly if they feel like the reason that you're talking to them is to determine whether or not they're the problem. Um And if you can't have folks speak openly, then you can't learn about system problems. And so then we get into a space of just feeling like we, we have no idea what, what to do like, and then that's when people often ask, well, can't, I learn and also punish like is it should I not be able to do both because it feels impossible to figure out how to not do both. When our thought process is after an event, we have to figure out do we have a person problem or a system problem where we would love to get to is the recognition that person problems exist before we have events. So if we're worried that we have a person problem, we should be thinking about that, looking about about whether or not this exists, talking to people about that long before we have an event. And when we have an event, our thoughts have to go to, we have to understand the system behind it.
[00:11:41] spk_1: Yeah, this is and we have an event if our thought is not. Well, now I need to go and punish to make sure everyone knows how serious this is. Or now someone needs to be quote unquote held accountable. Or now I need to think about who's to blame if we have recognized that we know our person problems before an event. It's just simply now, I know I have a really brittle system. I need to go really learn about right. When we have an event,
[00:12:05] spk_0: yes, we can always assess whether or not we have person problems and we can always assess whether or not we have brittleness in our system when events occur. There is we don't have a need from a from a learning standpoint, right? To have to assess whether or not at that moment in time, we have a person problem because we have many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many other opportunities to assess if we have a person problem before we have events. The difficulty becomes how our policies are currently written. Right. It's the policy itself and how we've looked at it in the past that becomes the, the barrier to us being able to separate those concepts. And
[00:12:47] spk_1: you can go back to the Taylor episode of, well, it's parent child relationships, you have to teach them, we can go into that to we're blue in the face, but we're now 2.5 episodes into this accountability stuff. And it seems pretty complicated. I wish there was some like, I don't know, like a matrix of sorts where I could see this all out in front of me and have this little path to follow. I think I often compare it to like Candyland shoots and ladders. Like just go down here, go down here. Isn't there
[00:13:14] spk_0: just a tool that can fix all of it? And
[00:13:16] spk_1: obviously we're talking about culpability matrixes. So,
[00:13:21] spk_0: yeah. Yeah. So, so if you haven't heard of a matrix before, it is an attempt to take all of the really complex, complicated things that we've been talking about and lay it out into a flow chart that you can use, sort of yes or no thought processes around. And so people ask quite often our opinions on culpability matrices and if they should be used. Um Once again, if you, if you haven't heard of them, like the questions that are on a culpability matrix are things like, hey, did an individual intend their action? Um Did they intend the effect of their action? Did they knowingly break a rule? Were the expectations reasonable, workable, understandable, correct and consistently enforced would appear have done the same thing. Um Those types of questions, the difficulty with the culpability matrix is that it forces you to learn if you have a person problem after an event. So the same difficulty that we're just talking about is baked into how you would use a culpability matrix. Rather than saying, hey, when we have events, we need to learn about the brittleness in our system, including perhaps the brittleness of our performance management processes, right? Instead it forces you to try to look to see if you have a person problem post event, which then gets you into that same place of how do I learn about context? If the people I'm trying to learn context from, are afraid that I'm going to use that information to punish them. That said there isn't no value in a culpability metrics. And it's often like a really nice uh stepping stone for organizations that are trying to make this change. Um And in my world, the way that we used it quite effectively is that um we used it as a, as a way to, I don't know, put, put maybe a, a pause on the idea of punishing someone, meaning if an event occurred. And the current response in the organization was, well, it was a cardinal rule. This person needs to be punished. Well, then those of us that were in this hop space would use the culpability matrix to kind of walk through the contextual information that we would need to learn in order to really understand if we did have a person problem or did have a system problem. Now, once again, when you go learn about it, you still have this whole idea of punishment hanging over your head and the other person's head in the back of their mind because we're still in the same difficulty that we were in before, but it at least gives a little bit of room for operational learning. So I personally would use it as a way to allow myself to get permission to go run a learning team post event instead of just having to be satisfied with. Um with this idea of, well, we're just going to punish the person and move on. So I would say things like I'm not sure that we really know if a peer would do something similar, perhaps we need to go do some operational learning. I'd be more than happy to do that to learn. And actually,
[00:16:20] spk_1: it's easy to get stuck on that exact part because hindsight bias is just kicking in. Right. It's, oh, well, so, and so ran a stop sign and, and there was an incident. So Pier, would you run a stop sign? No,
[00:16:35] spk_0: absolutely not.
[00:16:37] spk_1: I've never run a stop sign. It's like, oh, see, there it is. That's it. I got it figured it out.
[00:16:42] spk_0: Yeah. So even that question can be super dangerous. Um, but in this case, like even in the example of the wearing gloves around that routine equipment, one of the ways that we got permission to operationally learn was to say, we don't even know if this rule has operational fidelity. We don't know if other people would be wearing gloves in a similar case. We don't know if the rule was reasonable, workable and consistently enforced. We don't know any of that. So we probably should go learn before we make any decision on how to address this event.
[00:17:16] spk_1: All right. So let's, I'm gonna wrap this up in a way to bring us to our last point.
[00:17:21] spk_0: We have a, we
[00:17:22] spk_1: have maybe we'll see if we get it, uh which we've, we've kind of talked about all of this um over the past now, two and three quarters episodes as like keep the running clock going about accountability. And we have constantly said the, the thing you want to build is an environment of high accountability and to do that, it often requires giving agency to the people that are part of that group. And I think it'd be, it would be remiss if we didn't spend some time talking about that to wrap up the accountability sort of mini series.
[00:17:56] spk_0: Yeah. How do you allow people to have agency and ownership?
[00:18:02] spk_1: That's a great question. And I'm so glad you asked. Uh, so, well, we, we describe it with baking. Well, I describe it with baking. You just because I like baking. Um And I think it's, it's therapeutic in a lot of ways. Um both the making and the eating. So it works as a woman. But um I, I once had to give sort of an example of what it was like to work with. One of my bosses to someone who's new to the company and they were struggling with how to interact with that person. And it just, it's brought this analogy to my head which there's, there's sort of two environments. One is a low agency, one is high agency, a low agency environment would be if you were asking someone to make a cake. And you said this is a, I need it to be a two tier cake. The first tier needs to be vanilla, the second needs to be chocolate. It needs to be designed like this. It needs to have these ingredients to make sure you put this much salt, this much um cinnamon, this much sugar, this many eggs. But I guess you can determine uh what shape each tier will be. That's, that's what you get to do because that's why I let
[00:19:09] spk_0: me too. So I'm feeling super micromanaged at this moment in time
[00:19:12] spk_1: and, and we, we will talk about examples of where that happens outside of baking, unfortunately, because I wish it was just just baking all the time. No. Uh and so uh high accountability or high high agency would be, hey, we have a request for a cake. It needs to feed 10 people. You're the cake expert. I need you to make a kick. You think it be best to do that? They did ask that it would have vanilla and chocolate inside of it. But you, you know what to do with this, you know what to accomplish, you know how to get this done. I'm leaving your hands, I'm here to support you.
[00:19:41] spk_0: So a bit of a framework and a goal but not the specificity of the how
[00:19:48] spk_1: not what I think the best way to go and do this is and I'm telling the person who does the work all the time, who is the expert, how to do it? I'm just saying this is kind of the outcome we need to get to and these are sort of the paras being held to, but you're the expert and you can go and do the rest. You might need me. You might have questions I'm here but you know what you're doing and I'm going to support that.
[00:20:13] spk_0: OK. So in, in this, this complex world of accountability, right, we've tried to separate this notion of punishment from hold accountable and move towards this recognition that really to have accountability, what we're trying to create is a high accountability environment. And that punishment itself not only doesn't allow for you to have a high accountability environment, certainly doesn't solve problems unless you happen to have a person problem. Right? And, and in that case, you'd remove the person or you'd find them something else to, to do within the organization that allows them to thrive. And so this next piece of the puzzle is exactly what you're talking about. OK. If we want to create this high accountability environment, how does one do that? And part of the puzzle of doing that is to make sure that we are giving people agency where they can take it. So if we have a goal or an objective, rather than telling someone the way that they are supposed to meet that exact that objective or how I as the leader think you should be doing it. Instead, we're creating space for that person to use their expertise to have ideas and execute whatever of those ideas they can within the the constraints of the organization, which the idea of empowerment of creating agency is a big piece of operational learning that I personally had to learn how to, how to create the ability for people to take ownership and empower people actually in some very painful situations. Um, and it did not come naturally to me, but maybe, maybe we do a little bit of homework on agency and then talk a bit about it next time. How do you feel about that?
[00:22:07] spk_1: I feel great about it. Fantastic. Yeah. Ok. Let's, let's definitely do that. Ok.
[00:22:14] spk_0: So here's the homework. The homework is um, in something that you, you do in your work world or maybe even in your home life, something that you would normally tell someone how to do it instead of telling that person how to do it, um, try to give them some framework and then the freedom for them to do it themselves. So create a moment of empowerment that you normally wouldn't do in which you don't tell the person exactly what flavors and how to make the cake. You just tell them, hey, we need to make this cake and I'm gonna leave it up to you to figure out how to get it done. See if you can find a place in your life that you normally don't do that
[00:23:00] spk_1: and try again. Yeah, I mean, obviously don't set that person up to fail and say, I know there's secret parameters that you don't know but go and try it, like give them everything they need to know and then they
[00:23:10] spk_0: don't know that the cakes actually has to be shaped like, like a battleship, like
[00:23:15] spk_1: it's a mandatory battleship cake, all those that we run across. Um, so, yeah, that's, I think a great place for us to try and we'll pick up the kind of, uh, next episode. We'll do a little bit of that round up on the homework and talk more about agency and things like that and I like it. I like it all right. Uh, thank you all for listening and we will see you in two weeks.
[00:23:46] spk_0: Well, that's
[00:23:48] spk_1: it. Yep. Another one in the books we did it.
[00:23:53] spk_0: If you uh want to send us any of your thoughts, actually fling us any of your thoughts you can do. So at the website www dot hop podcast dot com.
[00:24:05] spk_1: That's Hoppo DC A ST dot com. That's still
[00:24:12] spk_0: such a stupid name.
[00:24:13] spk_1: We look forward to hearing from you. Thanks for listening.