The Hidden Science

The following is an excerpt from Scott Griffith's upcoming book, The Hidden Science -- Managing Organizational Risk through the Sequence of Reliability

What Your Organization Never Intended to Do

Sometimes in business, as in life, you get exactly what you expect. We make plans and hope things work out accordingly. They usually do. But sometimes, the unexpected happens. When accidents happen or we don’t get the results we expect, we’re often left wondering why we didn’t see it coming.

The unexpected outcome might be from forces beyond your control, such as a natural disaster or economic downturn. Or sometimes harm comes from your organization's own hand, doing what you’re good at doing only this time with a different result.

It’s what the organization never intended to do, the result you didn’t see coming. It’s the harm that takes place in any organization – the law of unintended consequences. Sometimes the harm is catastrophic, a sentinel event such as an industrial accident.

Wouldn’t it be better if we could understand the causes of these unintended outcomes and keep them from happening? Leading your organization has always been about focusing on what you do well – serving the needs of the marketplace through the efficient delivery of products and service, treating patients, or transporting passengers, for example.

In fact, many of the top leaders in organizations were hired or promoted because of their operational experience and expertise – being good at the organizational mission. But how many are experts outside the core business strategies?

The key to better results is this:

Success requires a relentless focus on what your organization does well, and just as important, what it doesn't.

The Hidden Science

How do we keep from doing what we never intended to do? There’s a pattern to how bad things happen, and a science to preventing them. This book is about that science, and how it can help us get better results for our organization and in our everyday lives. It’s the hidden science of reliability.

And it’s been hiding in plain view.

Why? Because it evolved in a crooked line, coming from diverse areas of expertise, segregated by specialties. The hidden science synthesizes engineering, behavioral psychology, neuroscience, ethics and the legal system. That leaves us with challenges. For instance, engineers know system design but don’t always understand human behavior because they don’t think like typical humans. Psychologists and neuroscientists understand how people think and act, but don’t always know how systems work because they don’t think like engineers. And lawyers think differently than all of us.

But if we fit the interconnected pieces of the puzzle together, one at a time, we can use the whole picture to manage risk and get better results. If your business is in a high-consequence industry – such as aviation, firefighting, healthcare, or nuclear power – your organization will see dramatic success by applying reliability science.

But every company – and individual, family and community, for that matter – is high-consequence at some level, isn’t it? The principles and strategies we’ll examine go far beyond preventing plane crashes, explosions, and bankruptcies. This science also applies to the corner grocery, the online retailer, and the classroom.

The hidden science can also help you prevent catching a cold or the flu, make better choices in what you eat, and be a better parent. It can make your car safer, your house more efficient, your children do better in school, and the business you run more profitable. The executive, the factory worker, the student, the teacher, the janitor, the doctor, the nurse, the pharmacist and the patient all can benefit from it.

To get better results, we start by recognizing:

Organizations = combinations of people working within systems

Optimal results require an understanding of the complex ways in which people and systems interact, and how to manage them differently than we’ve done in the past. That often means avoiding blaming people when a bad result happens, before you make sense of the risk and the system in which it happened. And understanding why humans find it hard to follow rules.

Organizational success requires more than advice on leadership and culture. Many organizations get the order wrong by focusing on the art of leadership, believing that persuasion and influence drive organizational success. While it’s true that a few select businesses succeed through force of good ideas and personality, sustainable success in business requires more than charismatic leadership: It requires an understanding and application of the hidden science.

These concepts and the skills it takes to apply them are within your grasp. You’ll learn how to see and understand risk through different lenses, manage both systems and people more effectively, and improve organizational performance.

You’ll also learn from everyday occurrences – waking up on time and getting to work, driving to the store, helping with homework, running a business – and from examining catastrophes of Titanic proportions. From these, a strategy to help you improve will emerge.

We call this strategy the Sequence of Reliability.

If you'd like to learn more, contact me at:

scott.griffith@sg-collaborative.com