Culture Change Doesn’t Happen by Telling People What Not to Do

Yesterday I watched another black life lost in a grisly video.  The police arrested an un-armed black man for a minor offense.  The police knew that they were being watched.  They had to know that their actions were being filmed.  Yet they did it anyway.  Why?

I’m going to give an answer in this post.  You’re going to say, “That’s damn presumptuous.”

You’re right.  I’m a chemist by training, not a sociologist, not a psychologist.  But I did run pharmaceutical plants for 25 years.  When you’re managing people, you have to learn the ‘gists on the street, or you’ll go crazy.  I believe that my experience in the little microcosm of a pharmaceutical plant provides insight into the massively complex problem our society faces.

It’s actually not so unusual that a complicated system can be understood by studying simple analogues.  That’s what football coaches do for their players.  That’s what music teachers do when they drill the scales.  That’s what biologists do when they study one-celled creatures.

In our plant we found ourselves in an unenviable position.  We had gotten a rather rude awakening from FDA about our state of compliance to Good Manufacturing Practices.  When we analyzed our problem, we found that we had a decent set of procedures in place.  Where we were lacking was in getting everyone to follow those procedures.

The solution was simple, right?  Retrain everybody and discipline the perpetrators.

Wrong!  We created chaos; for so many reasons.  In some cases our procedures did not represent the reality of our processes.  That was straightforward to fix.

In most cases, however, we had to deal with the messy reality of the workers’ world.  The people with their hands on the equipment – the people who actually create quality – are at the focal point of a thousand conflicting pressures every day:

• Quality
• Safety
• Profitability
• Employee relations
• Company rules
• Time
• On and on

When an error was made, management’s instinctive action was to correct the problem.  Frequently the employees were blamed.  If they weren’t blamed, they felt like they were being blamed.  Then they got defensive and clammed up.  Thus, our most important source of information on how to improve our processes dried up.

Then we perp-walked the worker to the training room and put hir through the same training regimen that allowed that error to happen in the first place and expected a different result.  What’s that the definition of?

We had to find a different way.  Setting clear rules and then disciplining the workers when those rules aren’t followed DID NOT WORK.  We had to find a different way.

The solution we developed is outlined here.  But in short, there five components that worked together to dramatically improve GMP compliance (and save money):

• Management support
• Delegated objective setting
• Peer to peer help
• Measurement
• Recognition of small successes

Through the combination of these five components the workers began to develop quality habits which replaced the bad habits which had caused our noncompliances. 

Of course, this did not mean that rules and corrective action went away.  Absolutely not.  What it did mean, though, is that this became a smaller and smaller component of our improvement process over time.

In developing Positive Compliance^TM, we found is that when the workers encounter a conflict, they revert to habit.

Although you do your best to write SOPs that cover every possible situation, the real world is complex.  You cannot cover every possible situation with a procedure and then train the workers to all those procedures.  Workers are constantly running into conflicting pressures and when that happens, they fall back on old ways.

Those of us who torture ourselves by playing golf know this well.  When you swing the club, you have to keep your eye on the ball until AFTER the clubhead strikes the ball.  But there’s something primal in us that make us raise our head while still on the downswing.  It usually occurs in a tense spot, with a pond in front of the green and a sandtrap behind.

We know we can’t raise our head.  We tell ourselves when setting up the shot not to raise our head.  We promise ourselves that we won’t raise our head.  Then we go ahead and do it anyway! 

It’s been the cause of many clubs following the ball into said pond.

I do the same thing when my wife comes home from a frustrating meeting.  She complains about some difficult participant.  I know that I’m supposed to validate her concern and not offer solutions.  Then I go ahead and do it anyway!

Think of any field of human endeavor and you will find the same, inevitable reflex action.  People follow their habits, especially in tense situations.  They will follow their habits in spite of the clear, negative consequences of those habits.

The question then, is how do you change those habits?  What we found is that you can’t change habits by upping the ante on the negative consequences.  That only creates chaos.  Again, you don’t forget about the rules and the consequences for infractions.  But the way to change bad habits is to replace them with good habits.

You cannot change a culture by increasing the negative consequences for bad behavior.  You change a culture by replacing bad habits with good habits.

I don’t know the details of how this could work in a police department.  But I can predict the outlines of a successful implementation.  It will include the following five components:

• Management support.  The bosses in the government have to support cultural transformation.  They also have to sell the “case for change” to the cops on the beat.  Cultural transformation cannot happen without the participation of the workers.
• Delegated objective setting.  The bosses delegate to the normal police teams the ability to set objectives for positive change that the teams can implement.  Those objectives must support the overall departmental goals.
• Peer to peer help.  Members of the working teams help each other to achieve the objectives the teams have set.
• Measurement.  The teams measure and track their progress toward achieving their objectives
• Recognition of small successes.  When a team achieves its objectives, top management recognizes that achievement.  Simple recognition is a surprisingly powerful motivator.

Out of this process will develop the positive habits which will replace the old negative habits which cause our present situation.

One thing to note.  The “case for change” does not necessarily mean that everyone is going to love what’s going to happen.  The “case for change” might be something like, “Folks, we’re going to have to change.  We might not like it, but it’s going to happen with us or without us.  We have an opportunity to influence how it’s going to happen.