PAPod 538 - From the Archives: Exploring Trust and Openness with Edgar Schein

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

So before I even roll out the opening credit stuff, today is a big day. Actually, it's part one of a two-part big day. Does that make sense? And probably enough, you know, enough. You'll be fine. I got to spend an entire day with Edgar Schein and actually his son Peter was with him as well. And he was completely cool and kind of excited about us recording it for the podcast so you could hear as well. So that's what today's podcast is. Part one of a two-parter.

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

Hi everybody todd conklin pre-accident podcast pre-investigate what is this called what are we you'd think after 500 of these you'd know what to call pre-accident investigation podcast that's it yeah i can't do it i cannot do it so you're about to enjoy the fabulous twinings of edgar shine, get ready pumpkins it's good it's really good it's it's just such a treat to be to be with him and to hear him talk i one of my favorites i think i've talked about this before on the podcast one,

of my very favorite things to do is be with these these academics as they enter the twilight of their careers and is that a nice way to say that yeah that's probably the best way because, because they've boiled away so much of the academic crap. So I don't know if you know, do you know the old joke about, about universities? People are so mean to each other in universities because the stakes are so low.

That's the joke, right? The funny thing about academics is they're constantly sort of, the system is sort of incentivized to make everybody kind of an enemy. And what I love, and I got to see this with Edward T. Hall and just a whole bunch of incredible scholars.

Ev Rogers was just a joy. is towards the end of their academic arc, I'm trying to think of gentle ways to say this, as they enter the next phase of their career and life, their thinking becomes so much more clear because they've sort of spent their entire career boiling their ideas down to these really quite remarkable statements. Like Edward T. Hall said, if you want to understand another culture, make a friend. I mean, that's an amazing, if you think about that,

my life's work ended up on that phrase. That's a pretty cool phrase to end with. Ev Rogers was completely convinced at every level that communicating with one another was part of a larger system that involved really the whole person. And so we didn't communicate just in language, but we communicated in this entire package. and Edgar Schein has really boiled his thinking around organizations, culture, and safety to a great extent.

Two words. I'm not going to tell you what those two words are because you'll get to hear them. I mean, I could tell them. I know them, but I'm not going to blab them out now. I don't want to say spoiler alert the two words are. That'd be cheesy. I just want to sit back and let you hear this conversation. Now, we're together with the folks at Chevron, and it was so sweet of them to invite a bunch of us to come see this.

And we were talking about fatalities and serious injuries, which, you know, is a topic we probably need to spend a lot more time specifically throwing away the classic industrial safety conversation, the injuries and industrial harm things. They're important, but talking specifically about fatalities. And Shahika Korkmaz, who's a dear friend of mine, invited Edgar Schein. And Peter, his son, came with him. They traveled together.

And he spent, gosh, a good hour and a half. You'll see, because it's the reason it's two podcasts, just kind of talking about safety and how the world works, and what in fact is going on. And I think you're going to find this conversation to be really an interesting, it's fun, it's really good. I think the very best thing I can do is not feed you more information about my exciting summer, even though it's dwindling, almost it's over. I mean, we're into bluegrass time right now.

I think the best thing I can do is sit back and relax and listen with you. And you'll hear Edgar Schein. And Peter's going to jump in once in a while talking about safety and fatalities and serious incidents.

So here it is. The Pre-Accident Podcast gladly welcomes Edgar Schein another time. Sit back, relax, and enjoy. But it's a good lead-in to what what we want to discuss with you today, Instead of giving you a detailed analysis of how to think about culture, I really want to think about safety and improvement and effectiveness. My interest in this goes way back to the earliest organization development work, as some of you may or may not remember, was done in the oil industry. Exxon and Esso Chem.

And those companies did a lot of, they put a lot of resources into their own improvement projects. They funded a lot of the management T groups that were operating in those days. Is Blake Mouton a name that still rings anywhere? They had a whole program that the oil companies were using for self-development.

So it's interesting that that is not a common name anymore to you, because at one time it was the thing to do, a self-administering one-week workshop that would work its way through all the layers of the company. And so anyway, it started there, and then as I started to be a consultant with Digital Equipment Corporation, they didn't really have a safety problem, but they have had effectiveness problems.

And at the same time with Sibagygi, at that time, a big chemical conglomerate that then became pharmaceutical and is today Novartis. They clearly had safety issues, particularly with drugs. They produced thalidomide, the drug that produced all these unfortunate birth problems. So that's a very extreme form of a safety issue when you have a product. Produces something very undesirable and unwarranted. And then I got involved with Con Edison as a consultant for over 15 years.

And that's where I learned the most, because when you look at a program like this as an outsider and don't look at a cross-section, okay, what are they doing right now? What is the current program? If you look at this across 15 years, you see all kinds of nuances that the cross-sectional analysis doesn't get you. So that got me very interested.

And then I got involved around the culture issue with the nuclear industry, both in giving talks to the people in Vienna and then becoming a member of the advisory board of INPO. How many of you know about INPO? Should probably be most of you. It's a very ingenious device for an industry to create its own internal development organization, both to measure how we're doing and to provide teams that not only measure but then help to improve the organization.

So for five or more years, I heard the stories of what was going on there. And they all lead to, I have about six points and then some handouts. The first main point. It's a very simple point, and I suspect, I hope I'm preaching to the choir that the common element in all these safety and effectiveness programs is that they are all driven by the same two fundamental ideas, openness and trust.

If you look at all the safety culture lists, you'll always find openness and trust somewhere on that list. And what from our point of view, if you look at this culturally. They are not only the most important ones, but in a certain sense, they are the only one. Because all the other things you do don't really work very well if you don't have people that are open with each other and that trust each other. So the thing I am most concerned about is that.

We get down into the trees and redesign the trees and the gardens and fertilizers and burn-offs and don't look at the forest and realize that the forest only works because of the synergy between openness and trust and how people relate to each other. Is that okay so far? Can you agree with me on that. So the first thing we have to solve is the trust and the openness problem.

So all the programs I saw in Con Ed, and every few years they had a new program, and the safety people said, if you don't have a new program, you lose motivation, and you get, That is, some of you have seen that. And what is lost in that is why do we need a new program every few years? Because there's something missing. There's some underlying thing having to do with openness and trust that hasn't gotten embedded in the culture, or else we wouldn't need a new program.

So point one is that safety and effectiveness are fundamentally the same. And point two is they all hinge openness and trust. So the Stanford right now, we're working with the hospital and the medical school on a variety of lean programs and improvement programs. Safety isn't right now the big issue. But what are all the improvement programs about and the quality programs? They're about trust and openness. So this convergence of effectiveness and safety is very important to get into your head.

You're not working safety, you're working total organizational effectiveness. Can you live with that? Yes. Is it taken for granted or do I have to sell it to you?

I'm in. We're with you. But, I mean, it is worth noting that the world doesn't necessarily see it that way. You might have to prove to them that this is the right way for the organization to think about it. But the world is still going to have all sorts of regulatory bodies that are only focused on, you know, fatalities and accidents. But to Ed's point, as organizations, what are the benefits of thinking of them as linked, as synergistic?

All right. So now the question that the previous speaker, where is it? Were you up? Yeah. Of everyone asking you, what do you want me to do and how will I know how I'm doing are really fabulous questions for this very point. So the answer from our point of view is a high level of trust and openness is what I want you to achieve. And what I want you to do to get there is to develop a different relationship with your teammates, your boss, and your direct reports.

All your human contacts have to go from something that in our books we introduce as level one, two, or three kind of relationship, where I guess we'll give you this first handout to explain what we mean by a level two relationship, that you can't have trust and openness if you don't have the right kind of human relationship, particularly with your direct reports.

The most common situation that I encountered in Con Edison, I was part of a group, two environmental lawyers and me, that were assigned to work for the board on improving environmental health and safety. So one of the things we did was we ran a lot of focus groups of electrical workers. And this was in the midst of Con Edison having, they were under indictment, they were on probation, so they had to work on this stuff. They were working very hard on it.

And so we would have a focus group and we would say, well, you have this timeout program, and so if an electrical worker is down there under the sidewalk and sees a problem and it's unsafe, you're supposed to call a timeout. Sure. Does it work? Well, most of the time it works, but there are some problems. Well, what's the problem?

Well, one of the problems is I tried telling my boss about this wiring didn't look very safe, and I could tell that he was being polite, but he wasn't really listening. Something in that immediate relationship wasn't working. The boss wasn't listening. Or he got annoyed with me because we were having too many timeouts, and his unit doesn't want to have more timeouts than the other units because they're measuring the hell out of the timeouts.

So the measurement system under the transparency logic, which we're going to keep hammering, is not the same as openness. Under the transparency logic, that supervisor is disadvantaged by knowing that he's got more timeouts than some other groups. And he kind of leaks that, to the employee, to the point where the employee says, well, this doesn't look quite safe to me, but I'm not sure I ought to call yet another timeout. You might get mad at me.

So openness gets undermined in the most subtle way, even in the midst of a program. Or maybe what the what the worker saw is a deeper problem, a fellow worker doing something unsafe. And it's clear that the rules are you should report that. And in the focus groups, they would tell us, no way. You know, we're unionized. There is no way I'm going to report on a buddy.

Just forget about it that's not in the cards ain't gonna happen so again what's the relationship between those two employees that would make them tolerate unsafe behavior because of a another norm that's that's operating there you never rat on a buddy is a very deep sort of a norm. So, we've got to find a way to redefine the daily relationship between every boss and every direct report and every team member and the other team members.

And the way we're doing that conceptually is to say the history of management has been way too focused on roles and role distance. Everyone has their job. They know what the job is. It's well described in the job description. And I'm your boss. My job is to supervise you. And I don't really want to get to know you. That might be uncomfortable. And yet getting to know you might be the only way to openness and trust.

That's the big message. And it's a very difficult message because I think we're fighting all of management history. Management history is wedded to the idea of roles, role relations. You know your job. I know my job. Let's not get too personal here because then it might lead to nepotism. It might lead to other bad things.

So what we're trying to describe in that handout is how level two differs from, from both a really negative relationship, what we call minus one, or the traditional role-based management relationship that I think most companies just buy into willy-nilly and not saying we want you to be intimate and saying there is a level of knowing who you're working with relevant to the job that you're doing that you have to achieve if safety, effectiveness. Openness, trust are your goal.

And the reason for that is the work has gotten too complicated. You can't define roles so neatly anymore. Back in the assembly line day, you could do that. But when you look at what, like General McChrystal's team of teams, when he says, you know, when you're fighting that war in Afghanistan, you don't even know what the right roles are until you're out there. Or another better example even is we've done a lot of work with forestry department.

When you're out there fighting these fires, the roles are constantly shifting. The work is constantly shifting. So what you really need to know is what's your buddy doing right now? And if the buddy is also my boss and we don't have a level two relationship, I don't know whether I can trust him. And he or she doesn't know whether they can tell me what's really going on. So we're pushing this concept. And it's a tricky one because it's so against management norms.

Psychological distance is a good thing. You don't want to fraternize. You don't want to have to hurt your buddy and rat on him. And yet, the world is going into a set of tasks and structures and work situations that, where the roles are shifting and unclear, and even hierarchy is beginning to be unclear, how to manage hierarchy.

So if we're heading into that world, I think we have a solid argument that you've got to somehow get to know your people at a deeper level than what is currently the normal management process. How do you react to that? Dr. Swing said transparency is not the same as openness. So in this situation, I think I'm going to use those words interchangeably, but they're not the same. Transparency is usually a management-directed set of numbers that we all should look at.

We should make it clear what work we're doing and how we're measuring it. We're not going to hide the ball. right? We're going to share every metric. We might even share all of the, you know, performance measures of every single employee because we're completely transparent. But that's as much of a weapon as it is. You said it doesn't even necessarily create openness.

No, I think that sort of weaponizes information, you know, because you end up with all of these sort of pathologies when you believe that that is going to really deeply influence performance. It creates new ways of hiding the ball. Because it's oftentimes, and again, this is mostly speaking out of Silicon Valley, where there have been tons of experiments of this kind of thing, you know, the transparent organization. But it's a different philosophy and it tends to be driven from the top down.

We will be transparent, gets sort of cascaded down through the organization. That's quite different than openness. And we'll get into it more unless, should we? No, I think let's push on with examples. I mean, the example I gave you of the electrical worker ending up saying, there's no point telling my boss, that's a loss of openness.

Openness is when every employee down in the trenches who sees something that ought to be attended to feels psychologically safe to go to somebody and say, I'm a little worried this valve doesn't feel quite the same way, you know, as it usually does. Openness is creating an environment where that employee will say, well, I'm not sure. It's a weak signal, but I think I ought to tell somebody.

That's what's missing, isn't it, in most safety programs, that willingness of everyone to point to things that might be going wrong. Because that's what often the accident review discovers, that there were all kinds of little signals. Somebody saw something that they didn't bother to mention. And had they mentioned it, the whole chain would have been different. At least in the nuclear situation, for them, that's critical. They can't afford to have anything anywhere not be mentioned.

But even there, it's hard to teach everybody that it's okay to waste time to tell stuff that might be a very irrelevant, weak signal. So, where it comes down to where this level two relationship is most important and most missing, by the way, is in middle management. Because middle management is living in a world of schedules. Productivity, career competition.

And so no matter how much the board and senior management says we really are concerned about safety, I could tell talking to middle managers that that was not really their daily reward system. Their daily reward system was not how many employees told them problems. Their daily reward system was whether they got the job done or not.

So the schedule, if you look at all the big accidents, all the Challenger and so on, it was schedule that was overriding the data that some of the engineers were providing. They had the data that the O-rings might freeze up, but the politics and the schedule and the reward system were at that point not about absolute safety. They were about, let's try it out anyway, because politically we'll run the risk.

The most terrifying thing I hear is when a hospital director or a senior executive says, well, you know, a few fatalities are just the price of doing business. And they're not talking about OSHA statistics, they're talking about fatalities. But they inevitably develop a mentality that, well, it's going to happen anyway, it's too difficult to get fatalities to zero, so we'll adapt and do what's next best, we'll be more efficient.

The minute you say, but are you more effective in the long run, then you begin to see, well, maybe the price of that fatality in terms of lawsuits and immoral behavior was not worth it. Maybe some companies should go bankrupt if they have too many fatalities.

So level two is the answer. And the question then becomes, what would it take to get that middle manager to create a climate for the direct reports and his fellow middle managers with whom he or she is competing for career goodies? What would it take for them to create psychological safety for their subordinates. Answer is their boss has to institute it in them, which means that their boss has to institute it in them.

So the only answer in the long run is if from the very top, you buy into the level two idea and then make it part of the reward system of the organization. Not a concept part of the reward system.

So what do you think that's part one okay that's only part one now i don't know how much i need to describe or explain you'll have to kind of tell me in the comments but when he talks about level negative one those are those are managers with no relationship to their people level zero is kind of the classic professional relationship. Level one is a much more personal relationship, understanding and knowing the whole person, family, kids, et cetera, et cetera.

Level two is an intimate relationship. That's probably different than what we're talking about. So those are kind of the levels he sets up. What's interesting is how he's really talking about relationship building and how our classic sort of industrial age, Federick Taylorism understanding of relationship building has been very separate and very sterile and how wrong that is and how it impacts the ability to create really this idea of trust and confidence.

And those are the big words. That's kind of, that's my word, but we can deal with it from there. That's part one. I bet you can't even wait for next week, and yet you'll have to. I know. I'm a trickster. It sucks. That's it, you guys. Part one is over. Part two is coming up. This is it.

Have as much fun as you possibly can. Learn something new every single day. I know you did today. And for goodness sakes, you guys, be safe. Music.