If you think crises, by their very nature, just arrive at your doorstep without warning, you’re not going to be looking out for any clues
In your research, you examine the warning signs that people ignore, leading to bad outcomes. Why don’t people take anomalies in their everyday work seriously when, in retrospect, they look like clear ‘red flags’?
The answer to that has two parts. The first is that, sometimes people just don’t understand the connection between small problems and the big issues they can become. If you think crises, by their very nature, just arrive at your doorstep without warning, you’re not going to be looking out for any clues. The other part of the problem is lack of time. This is especially true in high-paced, hazardous work, but the pace of work across all fields has sped up. People have so much information coming at them that it’s hard to know which weak signals to pay attention to, and which to ignore.
What kind of insights would we gain if we paid more attention to small disturbances?
Because of my background as a physician, I do a lot of work on medical error. While people often think of errors or mistakes as things that just happened, in fact, there is usually a journey of error. Things ‘become’ mistakes over time. Most people don’t look at the process of how errors can build upon themselves and become more serious.
Sometimes, it’s only by looking back that we can see what the early signs were, and sometimes they just weren’t possible to discern. But when you look at an event like BP’s Deepwater Horizon explosion, there were lots of clues that should have been apparent at the time.
Part of combating peoples’ natural tendency to ignore warning signs is to build mechanisms into organizations that encourage people to be more attentive to potential problems. Is this where the organizational capabilities you and Kathleen Sutcliffe write about come in?
Yes. Our argument is that unexpected events will happen, but you can still plan for possible emergencies. And it’s good to plan for those kinds of things because, even if the particular events you had in mind don’t occur, you will begin to develop general skills for dealing with problems. For example, getting better at coping with interruptions is important, and, as we’ve discussed, it’s useful to get in the habit of thinking about how small problems can become big problems. You have to assume that you will not be able to anticipate all eventualities, but building a set of skills so that you can manage these problems is pretty critical. We would argue that managing the unexpected is a fundamental capability that organizations need to build.
Attention allocation is one of the capabilities you argue can help us better manage the unexpected. How do you define this skill, and how would you go about developing it within an organization?
As human beings, our attention is a finite resource, and since so many things happen during the course of our working day, we need to figure out where to focus our limited attention. A fair amount of research has been done on what individuals pay attention to and what they ignore, and it turns out, you can have your attention focused on something and not notice things going on around you, even very striking things. A number of studies have looked at what people pay attention to at the very top levels of the organization, because these are the people tasked with making sense of the landscape in which the organization functions, and then taking action.
Are there examples of organizations that successfully manage attention flow?
I think there will be some kinds of work that we will never do virtually, but as technology gets better, who knows? You could be there via video and, while it’s not exactly the same as in-person, it is much richer than e-mail. Technology makes possible things that once seemed completely ludicrous. For example, most radiology work is now being outsourced, because digital imaging lets you instantly send CT scans all around the world. A radiologist in another hospital, or even another country, can analyse a scan and send it back. Radiology has historically been a very well-compensated field because you needed the doctor to come to the hospital in the middle of the night to read the emergency CT scan. It was an expensive item that couldn’t just be transmitted, but now it’s electronic. So who knows what will happen in the future?
[This article has been reprinted, with permission, from Rotman Management, the magazine of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management]