Fallibility at Work by Øyvind Kvalnes

Author:Øyvind Kvalnes
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

When hint and hope works, it is an elegant form of communication, where you succeed in correcting a person’s behavior in other people’s presence, without anybody else noticing it. On other occasions, the hinting is a feeble and weak barrier that cannot stop a mistake from creating a horrible outcome. The Tenerife disaster on March 27, 1977, where two Boing 747 airplanes from Pan American and KLM crashed on the runway, killing 583 people, one of the pilots took off before having received clearance to do so. A recording of the conversation inside the KLM plane reveals that the flight engineer hints that the other plan may be in their way. “Is he not clear, that Pan American?” (Weick, 1990). The warning signal he provides to the pilot is not strong enough, so he proceeds to take the plane onto its fatal journey. Here is an example hint and hope as part of a weak barrier system. The pilot makes a mistake, and it starts a causal chain that ends with disaster, since no barriers are in place to prevent it from happening. A steadfast and persistent flight engineer or co-pilot could have made a difference, but none of them dared to confront their senior, who was one of KLM’s highest ranked and most respected pilots. The pilot had recently provided the first officer with a qualification check to work in a Boing 747, and that might have contributed to make the threshold for confronting him higher than normal. In his analysis of the accident, Weick (1990, p. 574) comments: “Perhaps influenced by his great prestige making it difficult to imagine an error of this magnitude on the part of such an expert pilot , both the co-pilot and the flight engineer made no further objections.”

I witnessed an interesting example of hint and hope during a seminar for leaders in a Norwegian city council. Before the seminar, the administrative leader told me that he wanted to say a few words of truth to the fifty or so participants. He said to me that he was disappointed with the collaboration between them. Individually, they were thinking solely about their own units, and not about what would be best for the city council as a whole. There was little solidarity among them. Now he had the opportunity to confront them and demand improvement.

The leader then took the podium and told the leaders a story about gees, about how they fly together and support each other. Whenever one goose struggles to keep the tempo during flight, two other gees will connect to it and help it to gain speed. Whenever the leader goose is exhausted from flying in the front, another goose will take over, and allow the leader to rest. The audience smiled politely at the story, and that was it. Afterward, I talked to the administrative leader, who was very pleased with himself. “Now I really gave them something to think about.” he said, indicating that he thought he had been sharp and direct in pointing out a lack of collaboration amongst the leaders.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.