Returning after a summer break, David Provan and Drew Rae ask an uncomfortable question: are we lying about our safety performance? They examine Jan Hayes, Sarah Maslen, and Paul Schulman's 2024 Safety Science paper, "A Case of Collective Lying: How Deceit Becomes Entrenched in Organisational Safety Behaviour," a case study of Pacific Gas and Electric's decade-long falsification of pipeline locate-and-mark records — a scandal that produced $110 million in fines after a 2009 whistleblower complaint. The hosts unpack how routine, high-consequence safety work quietly became a numbers game.
The discussion traces how bonus structures, unrealistic targets, and "green" dashboards (99.4% on-time closure, later revealed as closer to 60%) pushed the lie from front-line workers up through management, with middle managers who once flagged the problem later normalizing it once promoted. As David Provan puts it, quoting the paper: "If you put workers in a position where it's very difficult, if not impossible, to meet the target, then organizations cannot be surprised if this results in gaming." The episode closes with five practical takeaways for auditing your own organization's incentive structures.
Discussion Points:
Quotes:
Drew Rae: "Organizations are not made up of robots. If everyone is doing the same bad behaviour, this has got to be coming from somewhere other than individuals wanting to do the wrong thing."
David Provan (quoting the paper): "If you put workers in a position where it's very difficult, if not impossible, to meet the target, then organizations cannot be surprised if this results in gaming."
Drew Rae: "We're not lying. We're just turning off the alarm while we finish getting the order."
David Provan: "A safety culture, a good safety culture, is one that lets the boss hear bad news."
Drew Rae: "Yes, 100% we are lying about our safety performance."
Resources:
"A Case of Collective Lying: How Deceit Becomes Entrenched in Organisational Safety Behaviour" — Jan Hayes, Sarah Maslen, Paul Schulman, Safety Science, Vol. 176, 106554 (2024)
Open access: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2024.106554
Diane Vaughan — introduced by Drew for her concept of "normalization of deviance," developed from her analysis of the Challenger launch decision. Her book: The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA (University of Chicago Press).
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo23528040.html
The Safety of Work on LinkedIn
Drew Rae - cohost [0:00 - 0:48]
You're listening to the Safety of work podcast, episode 137. Today we're asking the question, are we lying about our safety performance? Let's get started. Hey, everybody, My name's Drew Rae. I'm here with David Provan from Griffith University in Australia. Welcome back. After an extended delay to the Safety of Work podcast. In each episode, as always, we ask an important question in relation to the safety of work or the work of safety, and then we have a look at the evidence surrounding it. David, what are we going to talk about today?
David Provan - cohost [0:48 - 1:55]
So I guess today's paper, and we'll introduce it shortly, sort of follows a general trend in safety science from. And one way of thinking about that is from behavior to systems, so looking at the analysis at the worker level to more of an organizational analysis. So, as our listeners are no doubt aware, over recent decades, you know, safety research has moved significantly from explanations grounded in the actions of individuals to focusing on how systems and organizational culture drive the decisions and actions of individual people. And the literature sort of tends to contrast this kind of normative, behavioral view of action, where individuals are seen to be incompetent, complacent, careless, with trying to create explanations of how undesired behaviour might be grounded in organizational characteristics. So hopefully, by creating, I guess, a better understanding of the organizational view, we can move beyond blame, like we try to do in safety to organizational improvement. So, Drew, do you want to sort of talk anything more about this as a background and then we can dive into the paper?
Drew Rae - cohost [1:56 - 3:04]
So I guess I just want to acknowledge that there has been a bit of a pushback against this idea of moving from behaviour to systems. To some people, that's seen as making safety unnecessary, complex, adding in too much theory on top of the very basics of safety. But I do think it's really important when we get to something like the topic we're dealing about today, which is lying. Because lying, when we look at an individual level, can seem really much like this is just something that is obviously someone doing something bad, but when you look at it, that's not really what's going on. And so we have to go beyond just looking at the local behaviours to looking at the situations. And that's not making it more complex. That's just like understanding the reality that life isn't as simple as black and white, telling the truth, telling lies. And so understanding how organisations can have everyone telling the same lies, that kind of. You've got to realise that can't just be individuals. Organizations are not made up of robots. If Everyone is doing the same bad behaviour. This has got to be coming from somewhere other than individuals wanting to do the wrong thing.
David Provan - cohost [3:04 - 3:25]
Andrew I think I say sometimes to people when I talk about safety that some people conceptualise safety is a very simple and straightforward pursuit, that we've got a rule or an expectation and if it can't be followed, we expect work to stop and therefore how hard can safety really be? But this is a really interesting paper. Do you want to introduce the paper and.
Drew Rae - cohost [3:25 - 4:42]
Sure. So the paper is called A Case of Collective Lying, How Deceit becomes entrenched in Organisational safety behaviour. And if you and your organization feel seen by that title, I'm sorry, strikes a little bit close to home, I think the authors are Jan Hayes, Sarah Maslin and Paul Schulman, the author of those. The lead author is the one I'm most familiar with, Jan Hayes. She's a big name in safety science in Australia. David she's got a pretty similar profile to both of us. She had lots of experience in basically big industry safety, has done some consulting throughout her career, but she has been fully corrupted to the dark side and now her title is professor of Sociology. And if you look through all of her publications, of which there are many, they largely have this trend of talking about things like influence and ethics in safety, so bringing that sociological lens, looking at the human side of safety as it's practiced in hard technical industries. It's quite a recent paper published in 2024 in Safety Science. It was more recent when we put it on our queue of episodes we wanted to have. We're now late in 26, but yeah, 2024 is in publication terms, very recent and up to date and the paper is talking about events that only happened a few years ago.
David Provan - cohost [4:42 - 5:06]
Yeah, Andrew. Sarah has published quite extensively with Professor Andrew Hopkins as well, on topics like structures and cultures in organizations, performance measurement for safety, incentive and reward schemes and so on. So very credible authors to explore this, this topic. So should we introduce a little bit about what the paper background of the paper is and then we can talk about how they did their research?
Drew Rae - cohost [3:25 - 4:42]
Sure. So this is a set of events that happened in California. This is why the third author of the paper, PA Shulman, is from University of California, Berkeley. It's a gas utility, Pacific Gas and Electric, and this was a rather major court case, I believe, a significant enforcement action by the Public Utility Commission against Pacific Gas and Electric due to inaccurate reporting of pipeline locate and mark activities in Australia. We call this Dial. Before you dig, this is the idea that when you're doing excavation of any sort, whether it's digging in your backyard, installing new pipes, building a new building, then there are going to be underground services that you need to worry about. Some of those services are very well marked on very well kept plans. Many of them are not. And so there's a need to do these activities to work out where the pipes and wires are before you do the digging and a number of techniques to do that marking. Some of them are quite laborious and expensive, some of them are fairly straightforward, depending on how well the original underground surfaces were marked. You can imagine if you put in a pipe with lots of magnets along it, you can find those magnets fairly easily. If it's an old pipe that no one ever properly recorded, you've got to almost like drill very thin holes down into the ground to find the pipe without damaging it. David, you're a little bit more familiar with actually organisations that do this work. How badly have I described it?
David Provan - cohost [6:42 - 7:20]
No, no, very, very, very well. No, described it very well, Drew. So you know, the process here is that if you want to excavate on public land, then you contact the utility, in this case Pacific Gas and Electric, and they will send someone out and they will locate and mark any services before you start your, your work. So it's just part of the workflow. And I guess what we're going to talk about today is what happens if that doesn't happen. But the company tells people that they did that it did happen. So, yeah, pretty straightforward task. Happens every day, going out and finding these underground services and making sure that people are going to do the work, know where they are.
Drew Rae - cohost [7:20 - 8:16]
Yeah. And I guess there's two sort of like things in the background here. The first one is this is a fairly routine activity, but the consequences can be very, very serious. You're really depending on what that server service is. If it's a high pressure gas pipeline and you drill down into it, that's a major explosion happening. If it's the fiber optics that service an entire city, you've, you know, cut out Internet or potentially you've cut out electricity for a hospital. So it's high consequence. But it's also incredibly routine because, like every time someone does any sort of excavation, they generate a ticket and say, we need to know if there's services here. So you've got this very, very routine job that has like hundreds of thousands of times it needs to be done, but you don't do it. Nine times out of 10 it's fine. That 10th time it's not fine. And one time out of a thousand, it is so not fine that something really bad happens.
David Provan - cohost [8:16 - 8:58]
So we'll talk about this shortly as case study research. But as it, as it played out in 2009, a whistleblower contacted the regulator and raised issues with, you know, this particular process, which led to an investigation going back over a decade of this. These locator mark activities within this utopia. Utility ended up getting $110 million in fines and penalties in 2020. And the authors thought this was a really good opportunity to dive deeply into, you know, all of the records and all of the situation to try to understand what does this particular example maybe tell us or help us to learn about how companies may lie about their safety, performance systemically.
Drew Rae - cohost [8:58 - 9:04]
David, do you want to go into the method first or some of the literature they give us on just the background of lying in organizations?
David Provan - cohost [9:04 - 9:16]
I think the lying things are interesting, but since I just briefly sort of introduced that idea of case study research, it'd be great for you to, I think, explain how the authors approached the research and then we can talk about literature.
Drew Rae - cohost [9:16 - 11:39]
Okay, so I'll pose this, just a question to an organ, to the audience. You want to investigate lying in an organization. How on earth do you, like, find out about that, to research it? And you think of the various things that you could do. You could go into just any organization and interview people. People are not going to tell you the truth about lying. How are you even going to, like, find the liars amidst everyone who's talking about it? A topic like this, we really need to wait for a scandal to happen and for there to be some sort of public record to start being generated. So almost the only way you can do this is in hindsight, once we know that it's happened, to go back and try to reconstruct what happened. Probably the biggest, most famous example of this that people know about would be Diane Vaughan's work on the Challenger launch decision. And she introduced this theory that she called normalization of deviant. And this is where you know that there's been a bad outcome. It seems rather extreme that we've got to this point. So you go back and try to reconstruct. Okay, how did it become normal to get to this point where everyone believes something that is dangerous? What's great about this approach is you have access to lots of records, particularly in the US With US Court discovery processes, both sides have to produce their records to the other side. And quite often that actually then becomes a matter of public records. So everyone can go Back and look not just at the company records, but also at all of the disposition depositions, you know, the interviews of people. So you get lots and lots of very rich data, lots of records, lots of things that you can compare to each other. And you can compare what people said in an interview versus what they said in a deposition versus what the document actually at the downside of this, and this is always the challenge for Ethnoc, is this looks like a weird, extremely bad example. So it's easy to say, okay, this is the exception. Most companies don't work like. And we can't do that comparison with a case study because we can't compare this particular company to a similar company. Maybe what they did is actually really weird and exceptional and deserve prosecution. Maybe they're just the ones who got caught. And every company operates like that. That's not a question that you can answer from a case. So it's very interesting. There's just always this trap of not quite knowing how normal or how exception is with study.
David Provan - cohost [11:40 - 12:08]
And I think that generalizability is something that, you know, creates a huge opportunity for future research in this, in this space. But hopefully our listeners, you know, give us a bit of feedback about what they experience in their own organization around this. Because when I saw that title about lying about safety performance, I know with things like producing safety statistics with tender bids and things like that, you know, I think we've all heard organizations say, you know, what number do you want it to be? And I'll give you that number in terms of like, safety performance.
Drew Rae - cohost [12:09 - 12:44]
Yeah. But one thing that I always challenge my students when we're giving the case studies in a classroom setting is don't look at it and think, gosh, these people were really bad. We're not like this. Try to put yourself in the mindset of how do I know that my company is not about to make the Challenger launch lesion? How do I know for sure that we're not PG&D? We just haven't been. And try to find those points of similarity, those things that resonate from this study, even though you haven't had the bad outcome yet, and then try to work out in your own organization, how can we deal with that now before it becomes bad?
David Provan - cohost [12:44 - 14:11]
So if we dive into the literature, what I always love about, you know, the social science side of safety science is you pick up a topic like lying and there's just a huge body of literature. It's like the rabbit holes that you can go down in, in sociology are, are so interesting. But if we think about lying. You know, paper defines lying as an action or an inaction that's intended to deceive another person about the state of the world. And the research suggests that given the strength of workplace social norms, you know, there's a. There's the position that the pressure to lie may be greater in organizations than in other social contexts. So organizations may breed conditions that I guess promote or encourage lying more than other types of social context. And I'll just explain, maybe Drew, four types of lies. I thought this was good. We can have a principled lie. So I'm lying to protect others from harm, motivated by upholding my own morals could be defensive. So I'm lying to protect an individual. I'm intending malice. So I'm lying with the intention of harming other people or material, which is I'm lying for personal or for corporate gain. So sort of starting to explain what the motivations, what the systemic motivations might be or the individual motivations might be to intentionally deceive someone.
Drew Rae - cohost [14:11 - 15:18]
Yeah, David, I have a bit of a problem myself with this intended to deceive part of lying, because it's very hard to really get into the head of someone else about what their ends are. And humans have a bad habit of reading intentionality into other people's actions when it's not really the case. So, you know, another very common definition of lying is simply saying something that you know is not true and that doesn't have to be because you intend to deceive the other person. A very, very common lie is you say something that you know is not true just because it's easiest. It's not that you really care about whether the other person believes you or not. Particularly, the other person may in fact want you to lie. At least you're not intending to deceive or you're intending to avoid Nazi reaction, or you just don't really. It doesn't matter whether none of those have got that. And particularly in organizations, as we're going to find here, you might start with people who might, like, seem to be doing it for, like, personal. But really it's almost out of habit that just like this is the way it's expected to be done, and to not lie would actually be a really hard thing to do. So you're taking the easier path rather than, you know, a path intending to have some sort of deception.
David Provan - cohost [15:18 - 16:01]
Yeah, no, I think. I think. I mean, there's like. When we talked about our safety culture episode, you know, there's no single universally agreed on definition of Lying. But whether it's, you know, intention or whether it's. It's just. I like the way that you frame that. Just as we are putting a position across that we know is different to the reality of that position. And even in our own lives, it's like, well, I don't want to go out to meet with someone, so I tell them I'm busy. Even if I'm just sitting at home on the couch. I say, no, I can't do that, I'm busy. You know, like you said, it's just there are, there are individual motivations, I guess, more broadly around lying. But it's just fascinating in the organizational context where doing something wrong to make it easy is something that we wouldn't expect as much in organisations.
Drew Rae - cohost [16:02 - 17:58]
When you say you're busy, you know, your intention might be for them to believe you're busy. So your intention is to deceive them. But that's not your motivation. Your motivation is just to stay at home when you don't want to go out. You know, you're not motivated by wanting them to believe the wrong thing. And the next thing they point out is that like in organization, a lot of these motivations for lies come from our formal reward structure. So basically we set things up in organizations. It can be like actual financial rewards, like bonuses, or it can be performance evaluations. It can be as simple as, like, do other people believe that you're doing a good job? And when we set those structures up, it's really easy to accidentally incentivize the wrong. And many of our listeners, the problems with safety, that safety performance indicators very often incentivize people to produce numbers that look good. And if that doesn't represent the operational reality, then we're incentivising people to lie. I don't think that people would think of it as lying. They're just incentivised to produce numbers look good. And so they make the numbers look good. They're doing what they're told to do. But that develops momentum because if you do that the first time, you need to justify to yourself why you did it and justify that it's okay. And that justification then leads to you doing the same thing next time. So if, you know, the first time I manipulate the injury record, I do it because I fear getting in trouble or fear losing my bonus. But I tell myself a justification that I believe, oh, the injury record isn't actually accurate, so it's okay for me to adjust it. But now that I believe it's okay to adjust it. It's easier for me to adjust it the next time and the next time and the next time, so it gains momentum. So they give a bit of a list in the paper of some of these justifications. One of the most insidious one is we tell ourselves it's actually the right thing. So we have a moral justification. I have a more important thing than telling the truth here. To protect someone or to help someone who deserves it or to prevent someone bad. So actually it was the moral thing to do, to lie.
David Provan - cohost [17:58 - 18:19]
It's like if we, if we make this a recordable injury, then we're going to spend a lot of time on this particular topic, which is going to detract from us spending time on our serious injury and fatality hazards. So if I don't record this as a recordable, we can keep focusing on the important things we need to focus on for safety. So just as an example of, you know, like, we tell ourselves that it's actually the right thing to do for safety.
Drew Rae - cohost [18:19 - 19:39]
Yeah, that's a great example. Another one is more sort of like masking the problem. So we use euphemistic labels. We tell ourselves that it's not a lie, it is something else. You know, it's not a lie, it's just a reasonable adjustment to the figure. Advantageous comparison. Well, everyone else is manipulating their safety statistics and actually I'm just not recording one injury, whereas there's people out there who just like make the whole thing up. So what I'm doing is not nearly as bad as what other people are doing. How could I be expected to be like, precisely honest when there are people who are blatantly lying? Not my fault. Someone made me do it. My boss told me three times to make the figure better. I tried to fight back three times. Every time they told me to make it better, actually, they have made me lie to them. They didn't give me a choice or diffusion of responsibility. It wasn't me that lied. It was kind of everyone all together did it. You know, it's basically, this is an outcome of the system, is the system ends up telling a lie. But none of us individually really actually did something wrong. This is a little bit different to the moral purpose. So, David, the example you gave, they were actually telling themselves that it was actually going to be a good thing. The smaller side of that is you just say it's not a bad thing. No one really believes this number anyway. So what's wrong with distorting it a little bit and then dehumanisation? So this is the people who are impacted by the lie are not people who deserve to be treated appropriately.
David Provan - cohost [19:39 - 19:49]
Or even that it doesn't have human impacts. Like, we're just changing a number. We're still taking care of our people who are, who are injured. It's just a number. So it doesn't actually have a human impact associated with it.
Drew Rae - cohost [19:49 - 20:04]
Yeah. This is when people talk about, like, a crime without a victim. There's no victim here. Yeah. Therefore there's nothing seriously wrong. Or you actually just like, actively blame someone else. You know, this is slightly different from the they made me do it. It's more, they did something bad to me, so I'm doing something bad to them.
David Provan - cohost [20:04 - 20:17]
Yeah. Or maybe even in this context, it's like, it's not my fault because no one gave me the budget to do this properly. So I just had to say. I just had to say I'd done it, but I didn't have. No one gave me the budget.
Drew Rae - cohost [20:17 - 20:30]
Yeah, great example. Yeah. And we're going to see that particularly in some of these cases, this was directly. Their argument is they did not have the time or resources to do the check, therefore they had no choice except to lie about doing the check.
David Provan - cohost [20:30 - 21:13]
And then fascinatingly in the literature review at the start of this paper, around lying sort of talked about how organizations might minimize the motivation for lying as described above. And they actually said that the research suggests that it might seem obvious that, you know, developing and communicating a code of ethics that specifically address lying might be a good strategy. But the research says that this simply drives lying underground rather than preventing it. So it kind of says it's a bit like the authority to stop work research. Drew, this is not something that you write a policy about and saying, we don't want anyone to lie and think that you've solved any of these sort of motivations and structures and influences in your organization.
Drew Rae - cohost [21:13 - 21:19]
Yeah. The one that I find fascinating, David, is organizations that think they can do things like pre employment screening.
David Provan - cohost [21:20 - 21:20]
Okay.
Drew Rae - cohost [21:21 - 22:12]
So what you do is before you hire someone, you ask them if they're a liar. If they tell you they're a liar, then you don't hire them. Yeah. Does it doesn't work. I don't want to, like, dispute because there is research in psychology that says there are people who tend to be more honest than other people or people who hold, you know, strict honesty as a higher value. It's just a little bit like clumsiness. Even though it might be true that some people are, like, more physically capable than other people. It's just not an effective organizational tool to try to separate your people into the honest ones and the liars and get rid of the liars. Even though that might be true that there is that separation, you just can't do it as an organization. You're much better to focus on the overall conditions that promote truth telling rather than try to adjust it at the individual level, either by detecting the right people or by training people into being more honest. Just doesn't work effectively as tools.
David Provan - cohost [22:13 - 23:21]
So Drew, with that as a background, you mentioned the case study research. So just to give some color to the volume of data, they had the regulatory 182 page report. They had an 832 page response to that report from PG&E as the company and then basically the company context for all of this was the company had entered into bankruptcy in the early 2000s. 2001 I think, made its way out of bankruptcy in 2004. And following this, under the new CEO, the top organizational priority was in inverted commas. Transforming our business with a focus on trying to serve our customers faster, better and more cost effectively. Which interestingly drew this idea of faster, better, cheaper was the same mantra in the NASA shuttle program at around the same time, late 90s, early 2000s. And it's this idea that if I have a lot of pressure in my business to do things faster, better and cheaper, I may be creating conditions for untoward decisions and communication in my business.
Drew Rae - cohost [23:21 - 23:38
Yeah, and it's almost like a counter mantra within engineering, that triangle of fast, cheap or right. You can only ever pick any two of those. You know, the moment you claim that you want all three, one of the three is going to suffer somewhere.
David Provan - cohost [23:38 - 23:53]
And the exact same time period, you know, Boeing is taking the exact same approach during the exact same time period of trying to move from an engineering company to a commercially driven organization in the early 2000s. And we know the outcome of that sort of over two decades.
Drew Rae - cohost [23:53 - 24:19]
Yep. And so first thing we want to do when we want an organization to do things faster and better is we call in a consultant to study our company operation. And we the euphemism here is reduce staffing. But we all know what that means. There are 8,000 people who lost their jobs and 8,000 people's worth of work that is now not being done or is being trying to have other people in the organization pick up the slack somehow.
David Provan - cohost [24:19 - 25:19]
And this is the start of where it, where it unravels for me was fascinating. So you know, consultants come in and look at the maintenance staffing in the gas division. Right. And they look at the frequency of gas leaks compared with other utilities, and they conclude that, well, PG&E have much less leaks than other utilities, which must mean the assets are in really good condition, which must mean that you can have a lower number of maintenance staff than comparable organizations, not knowing that employees over a longer period of time were incentivized not to report the gas leaks that they actually found. So you're starting with a number that was based on a lie around gas leaks that then created a bunch of decisions and conditions in the organization that the momentum, like you talked about, that led to this whole locate and mark kind of decade of lying as well. So I just found that fascinating. If you start with data that's wrong, you just go from bad to worse.
Drew Rae - cohost [25:19 - 26:46]
So this is like the first perverse incentive, and this comes even before the actual lies that were the problem. In this particular case, you have crews going out and inspecting your gas lines to work out how many leaks there are. The supervisors in charge of those crews are paid a bonus based on the number of leaks. And finding fewer leaks results in a larger bonus. You are directly incentivising your supervisors not to report leaks. You know, there is no other way of looking at that than you do not want to hear about leaks. And of course, with those justifications for lying that we talked about earlier, it's not necessarily that those supervisors are, like, deliberately telling a thing that they think of as a lie. They are telling themselves things like the company, through its bonus system, doesn't want to hear the truth. They're telling themselves, it wouldn't matter if I told the truth because they don't want to hear it. They're telling themselves, well, you're not giving me enough time to do this properly, therefore, I have to lie. They're telling themselves, this is not really a leak. You know, I'm still fixing the leak. What does it matter if I report it as a leak or not, so long as I've fixed the thing. Who's getting hurt here? But the actual harm of all of this is the company doesn't know how many leaks there are, so it thinks it's safe to reduce the maintenance crews even further, further incentivizing the problems, because now they've got even less staff to go out and do the inspections.
David Provan - cohost [26:47 - 27:29]
Drew on the locator mark, if we move to that. So PG&E received 600,000 requests in 2012, and that increases to, you know, by another 50% to 900,000, or nearly a million requests in 20 so there's a database. They record their tickets and they record their responses. They have procedures in place for how to go and do this activity. They have a two day response time to these requests. So from the time the ticket gets raised, they need to have gone out and located and marked and closed this out within two days. And the late rate on those tickets was also in the short term incentive for a while. So if they became overdue or took more than two days, then it affected people's bonuses as well.
Drew Rae - cohost [27:29 - 28:09]
Quickly explain, David. These tickets are not generated by the company. These tickets are generated by. You are a construction company and you want to dig a trench. So you need to contact PG&E, get a ticket generated. And you can't start work either until you hear back from them saying, yes, it's safe to do the work or a certain amount of time expires. And you can assume that it's safe. And so this is why there's a deadline on this. Because the company is like held up from digging until you have done the inspection. And if you don't get it done in time, they're going to go ahead and dig and that's going to be a problem. So this is why you need to make sure you finish these tickets quickly to let the outside companies proceed with the work.
David Provan - cohost [28:09 - 28:37]
So the stats look really good. Right, so in 2015, there's like 3,000 late tickets. So it's a, out of almost 8, 900,000 tickets. So it's what we might all see in our safety dashboards all the time. It says it's showing as 99.4% on time, tickets closed, middle management, senior management, we're all just seeing this sea of green. 99.4%, 99.5%, you know, and everything looks really, really good, you know, in the
Drew Rae - cohost [28:37 - 29:04]
Reporting, particularly like, you know, 3,000 late tickets out of a million is amazing when you see that go down to 44, even though you've actually done nothing to make them go faster, all you've done is incentivize people to make them go faster. You haven't given them more people, you haven't given them more resources, you haven't made the process more efficient. All you've done is offered people a bonus and the number's gone down. Any level of critical thinking there, you got to think, hold on, something's a bit screwy here.
David Provan - cohost [29:04 - 29:31]
It's two orders of magnitude. It goes from nearly 4,000 to 40 in 12 months. Like it literally is in the paper. 3,385 late tickets in 2015. And like you said, Drew, 44 late tickets in 2016. And I guess it's a first good takeaway for businesses. Like when you see these green results, do. Do you apply any critical analysis to how is this. So how is this so green in a complex system?
Drew Rae - cohost [29:31 - 30:13]
Yeah. And there were people asking questions. They were just doing it at the middle management level. So one of the things that was uncovered is there are all of these emails going back and forth saying that these numbers can't be right and even talking about what they think the real number is. And the real number that was in these emails from people within the company to other people in the company was that in fact it was 60% on time, not 99% on time. But they're being pressured to get it down to zero. So yes, on paper, it's gone down to almost zero. In practice, it's around 60%. And they're being told, you know, get it down to zero.
David Provan - cohost [30:13 - 31:09]
Yeah. So then Drew. So this was a. So this was a widespread practice around this locate and mark process. I guess the paper and the records don't really make it absolutely clear who knew and didn't know, but it does. It is pretty clear that the locators themselves and the supervisors maybe didn't think this was appropriate practice. But clearly for some of those motivations we said earlier at their management level were heavily influenced to maintain this and expand this behavior over time. And they even got to the point where they wouldn't even refer to it as lying. When they were going through their interviews during this process, they were talking about workarounds, they were talking about inappropriately document. They were using a bunch of words and wouldn't come out and say we were falsifying records. Which is kind of interesting. How they. How the practice had become. This is the way that. This is just the way that the company wants us to work here. Yeah.
Drew Rae - cohost [31:09 - 32:09]
And it's easy to see that happening when, you know, you can say things like, okay, there is no status in the system for halfway actioning one of these tickets. So you're telling yourself, okay, the dropdown field only has not done or completed, and that's just a fault in the system. And they're not updating the software for us. So our workaround is we mark it as completed, but we know that it's still open and we still need to do the next step. So you've sort of like talked about it. You're not lying. It's just the system is forcing you to do this workaround. Where in the system, it's mark as complete, but in practice, you're still working on it, so that's not a problem. It will get done. The example, David, that comes to me is if you've ever been, like, waiting for fast food and you notice how this alarm goes off when it's been 44 seconds and they haven't given you the food yet, they turn off the alarm and mark it as complete, and they're still getting the food ready. And that's just the workaround because otherwise the alarm's annoying to everyone and doesn't serve any purpose. We're not lying. We're just turning off the alarm while we finish getting the order.
David Provan - cohost [32:09 - 32:40]
Yeah. And this would be a practice where in the afternoon on the day that something's true, I intend to do this. I'm going to go out and do this tomorrow. So I'll just tick it off in the system this afternoon. And obviously there's, there's a range of different ways this can play out. But I think as we move into the discussion in, in this paper, just the way that this just became part of the fabric of organizational life to the point that people weren't looking at this as, oh, gee, I shouldn't do this for this particular ticket on this day. It was just an organizational, I guess, part of the fabric of the organizational life at PG&E.
Drew Rae - cohost [32:40 - 33:01]
Yeah. And particularly there are consequences if the ticket goes late. You know that you'll get a phone call, you know that you'll get in trouble with a late ticket. There are no consequences for marking it complete when it's not yet complete. So the wrong behavior is ignored. But the, if you actually did the, like, rigidly honest ling thing, that is what would get you negative attention.
David Provan - cohost [33:01 - 33:59]
And so, Drew, we start the discussion by saying, so we've got a business that's got incentives and KPIs to chase a particular number. We haven't talked about it yet, but it appears that there's quite an aggressive leadership style in the organization around organizational performance. In this instance, this is sort of a real disconnect between the workaround and the safety risks. So not really connecting that if I mark something as complete and as not complete, someone could actually really hurt themselves. And then these, these audit findings and reports that were floating around the organization, no one was being called to account for any of the things that were being uncovered. And so that action or the inaction around this topic and these, I guess, these four causes together, the leadership, the incentives, the disconnection from risk and the lack of action just promoted and encouraged this practice to continue and grow.
Drew Rae - cohost [33:59 - 34:57]
Yeah, there are a couple of things here that I think are really confusing from the outside, but do a lot to illustrate how strong these pressures are. And the first one is you've got all of these middle managers who know about the problem and they're sending each other emails about the problem and trying to do something about it and complaining about it. And senior management just wants to believe the low figures. But these are not two separate groups of people because the problem's gone on for long enough that a lot of the middle managers get promoted to senior management during this time. And when that happens, they start behaving like the senior managers. So it's not like these are particularly honest people in middle management and then senior management behaving differently. It's the pressure that's put on people in those different roles that, you know, senior management have to be aware of this because they used to be middle management, but they're obliged to continue lying to senior management even once they are senior management.
David Provan - cohost [34:57 - 36:22]
I had a personal experience at one point and there's some research in the sort of sociology, organizational sort of sociology, literature that sort of talks about sort of corruption of role and task and assumed roles in organizations. Because I was in an organization at one point where one of the senior safety people was promoted into an operations management role. And I was like, at the time, I remember thinking, oh, this is going to be fantastic. This person is a safety person. No safety. And now they're actually running the business and this is going to be fantastic. We're going to have this opportunity to really make a case study for how to run a business safely or part of the business safely. It was almost like the day that they assumed that role as the operations manager, they switched to a Persona that you would normally associate with an operations manager. They started talking first about cost and productivity and it even over time, they became one of the harder managers for me to. To work with around safety, which was completely different to what I expected. So there's a. It'd be really interesting to sort of think about the psychology of when middle managers get promoted to senior managers. They sort of assume a role that's. That's different to maybe what they would have expected senior managers to be doing when they're in middle management roles, which again speaks to.
Drew Rae - cohost [36:22 - 37:27]
This is not really about the individuals. This is so much about the institutional performance that's expected of particular people in particular roles. And you've highlighted this before in your own work, David. That often what you believe about safety and what sort of like philosophy or education you have has very little impact on how you practice safety in your day to day job because it is so dictated by the situation around you rather than your own personal beliefs. The other thing that I found interesting here is the audits within the company. So this is like a formal management system. We're regularly highlighting the problem and reporting the problem. It's just that was treated as audit problems. And how do we deal with these non compliances raised by the audits? It was never like the disconnect. The audits were not revealing the truth of lies. They were just seen as audit actions. Audit non compliances that needed to be dealt with. And that's similar to research that Ben Hutchinson has done specifically into audits is we believe that they're capable of revealing these sorts of problems and they're really not. Even when they directly highlight it, they don't really raise awareness or create change.
David Provan - cohost [37:27 - 39:02]
Yeah. I think what's also interesting in the discussion here is that there's literature sort of it could be common to assume that corporate kind of misbehavior starts at the top. So this sort of stuff starts with the CEO that's directly sort of telling people, I need you to falsify these records. And, and what. But what this research sort of shows is that often the practice itself starts at the bottom because of a bunch of conditions that management have put in place. Not with the intention of creating this problem, but just as an unintended consequence of the way that leaders have established the structures and the incentives and the resourcing, you know, and the, and the culture of the organization. So this is where I think sometimes that without careful thought it's so easy to go, oh gee, we need to make sure we're doing a good customer service on this. Locate and mark. Let's put a KPI around Locate and mark. Let's put in incentive around locate and mark. Let's get everyone focused on doing this. I don't think senior management expect people to then suddenly create this widespread falsifying practice around these records. But if you put in place a structure like that, you don't then go and engage with the people doing it and say what would it actually take to achieve this level of performance? Do we have the resources we need? Are there any things that we haven't considered? Because organizations almost never do that step. You know, it does start with senior management, but it's not actually the behavior that starts with senior management, if that makes sense. It's the structures and conditions that senior management put in place that create the behaviour at a local level.
Drew Rae - cohost [39:03 - 40:33]
Yeah, David, I don't know if you've experienced this. In my own organization over the last couple of years, we've done a lot more use of explicit KPIs. And one of the things that I saw happen is people from the front line upwards would be trying to negotiate the KPIs to be more reasonable, both in the design of the KPIs and in the targets that were associated with the KPIs. And they would have that negotiation and they would lose that negotiation. So they, like, tried to make the KPIs to incentivize them to good behavior, but senior management insisted on KPIs that incentivised the bad behaviour. So people then just go into this almost like futility mode. Like, we tried to get reasonable KPIs. They insisted that these were the KPIs. You're giving us no choice except now to try to do these perverse actions. And so people are doing things that they know are not effective, but they feel forced to do them and feel justified in doing them by the senior management setting the KPIs in that way. And it's not clear here how the KPIs were formed, whether there was any sort of that negotiation. But people sometimes treat these perverse incentives as if the people giving the perverse incentive are still culpable for behaving in line with the KPIs, whereas often they really do feel forced into it like that they're being told they have to do this behaviour. So, yeah, I really don't blame people who manipulate injury statistics, particularly people who've tried to get better metrics inside their organization and have failed to get the better metrics. Then of course, they just manage in line with what they're told to do.
David Provan - cohost [40:34 - 41:23]
Yeah. And this. And there's a sentence, you know, that lifted straight out of this. This paper that. That says in. In quote, quotes, if you put workers in a position where it's very difficult, if not impossible, to meet the target, then organizations cannot be surprised if this results in gaming. Right. And so this has been the long narrative around zero harm and low accident rates and. And what we're talking about. So we're talking fairly loosely around the practice outside of this PG and E paper. But this practice of, you know, and I guess the title of this episode, you know, are we lying about our safety performance? And, you know, I can. I'll go on record as a safety person and say, I've absolutely made decisions in the, in the gray areas around incident classification to, to have injury numbers under certain thresholds at certain times for a bunch of reasons like what we've spoken about so far today.
Drew Rae - cohost [41:24 - 42:05]
So a couple of other things that they discuss in the paper, they discuss the leadership style and that like when you have a particularly what they describe as an aggressive leadership style, this is something again, we see in safety a lot is senior managers feeling that like they're doing the right thing by taking a really hard line on safety. And you're insisting that safety is important and that sort of like, can create extra pressure to conform to the misreporting of data. David, you already pointed out that, like this disconnect between the actual risk and the workaround. It doesn't sound like you're putting someone's life at risk when you operate a workaround in the system. But that is in fact what is happening.
David Provan - cohost [42:05 - 42:26]
And I think that's that where the system encourages. The problem that we're worried about in safety really arises when the systems encourage individuals to lie about things that matter for safety. So anything that you're doing in your organization that could encourage misinformation to be shared or actual information to be not shared is a problem.
Drew Rae - cohost [42:26 - 43:16]
And then the final thing they point out is even though these, there's this existence of an open secret and there are these audit findings saying that the numbers are incorrect, that in itself is not seen as something that is like, blameworthy or that needs to be investigated or that someone needs to be held to account for. So the existence of inaccurate data, the existence of falsified data is not itself seen as, oh, we need to investigate this, we need to find out who is to blame for this. Whereas reporting statistics that look bad, that triggers an investigation. And so they mentioned this idea of prospect theory where it's always worse to point out the problem than it is to just go along with it. And that means that there's no one who's got this incentive to actually try to get something done about it. You're putting your own head on the chopping block when you do that.
David Provan - cohost [43:16 - 44:15]
Yeah. And the psychos, the sort of psychological safety work is really clear on that as well. The whistleblower research is really clear on that as, as well. So I also found at the end of this paper, Drew. And then I'll. Anything you want to say before we go into the practical takeaways for the episode, but just how lying may result from what the authors call a mismatch between stakeholder expectations and organizational capacity. I think that's really good. I think when you look at your stakeholder, senior management, regulator, customer, you know, what are their expectations and does your organizational capacity. Do you actually have the organizational capacity to genuinely deliver on those expectations? And if the answer is no, you may be seen to be delivering on those expectations without really delivering on those. On those expectations. Because people will make do with what they've got in a way to try to make themselves be seen to be delivering as much as possible or as close as they can get to what those stakeholder expectations are.
Drew Rae - cohost [44:15 - 44:46]
Yeah. And the real problem in safety is we often don't know what is reasonable. Does anyone want to say out loud what is an okay number of injuries for our company to have each year? Realistically, how low are we capable of driving it? We know that it's not zero. We're not capable of like, eliminating all injuries. But what is a reasonable number versus what is. No, this is too high. And within our existing capability, we could be doing better. That's really hard to know.
David Provan - cohost [44:46 - 45:59]
It is really hard. I tried with an organization at one point, Drew, to have a reasonableness conversation where I went, okay, let's set a target for closed actions from safety incidents. Right. So what percentage of our actions do we close on or before their due date, when they're set? Right. And I tried to get a sensible discussion to go, let's set that at about 60 or 70%. Right. So when we finish an investigation, we set an action to do something, we set a time frame. Let's kind of assume that, you know, maybe six or so out of 10 we can get them done. But for the other four, something's going to come up, priority is going to change. We're going to underestimate the time it takes to do something. Let's allow that. But the organization could not wrap their head around not setting a 95 to 100% target for closing everything on time. And then did an audit at the end of the year and found that 60% number might be a real thing and found about 40% of actions that actually been closed out in the system and never done. Right. So, you know, but, but, but if we had have set a 60 or 70% target and accepted that, yeah, look, 30 or 40% of these things do drag on for a bunch of reasons, we, we would have been in a far better position than having things closed out that were never actually done.
Drew Rae - cohost [45:59 - 46:11]
Yeah. And it's difficult if you believe genuinely that the number should be better because then As a leader, you move into that more aggressive style and you just say, like, this is not acceptable. It should be possible to get it better than that.
David Provan - cohost [46:11 - 46:43]
But this paper says if that is what you want, then you need to provide the organizational capacity to do that. So you establish a team just to implement safety actions and recommendations. You budget and resource that team and provide them with millions of dollars so that they can do that. And then you can say, okay, we have a whole team now that's implementing these actions. They have the budget, they need to do it. And so then we can expect 95% to get done because we've created the structures and resourcing and capacity to do it.
Drew Rae - cohost [46:43 - 47:09]
Yeah. It takes a lot of trust when someone tells you they want that amount of resource for you to actually believe that that is right and that they're not inflating the number or asking for extra resource to boost their own, you know, power within the organization. Yeah. And trust in both directions to believe that if you tell them the reasonable number, that they'll actually believe you. David, how often in your career have you inflated the resources you need because you knew someone was going to cut 20% off the estimate you gave them?
David Provan - cohost [47:10 - 47:14]
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Do we want to do practical takeaways now, Drew?
Drew Rae - cohost [47:14 - 47:15]
Yep, absolutely.
David Provan - cohost [47:15 - 47:52]
So I guess the first one might be a little bit obvious, but, you know, systems that reward misrepresenting reality, so, you know, having a look across all of the safety information and I guess critical safety processes in your organization and say, do we have any structures or incentives or systems that are going to encourage, reward, motivate people to misrepresent reality? And I guess, what does it mean for a team to be doing a good job on their core work and how aligned are our expectations about what a good job looks like for anyone exposed to a safety risk?
Drew Rae - cohost [47:52 - 48:11]
Yeah. And that's where that reasonableness comes in, is what is a reasonable target for a good job? Because if it's not reasonable, then it is easier for people to misrepresent the performance than it is for them to improve the performance. And once you get to that point where they can't easily improve the performance, they're just going to be forced to improve the reporting.
David Provan - cohost [48:11 - 48:57]
Yeah. The second one is, I guess, a broad label of just culture or speaking truth to power. You know, I think Sidney Decker will regularly say that, you know, a safety culture, a good safety culture, is one that lets the boss hear bad news. How able are people lowering the organization, able to tell people higher in the organization exactly what's going on. Like, exactly what's going on. And lots of organizations talk about that, but very few I've seen, you know, have a good culture of people being able to say, you know what, we only do 50% of these inspections on time, and the other 50% we just close out and never do right and be able to say that to the senior management group in an organization and have something done about it.
Drew Rae - cohost [48:57 - 49:17]
There's something a number of the hot people talk about, which is, what's your first reaction to bad news? Because what you really want is, I'm so glad you told me that, because that is important information. The first thing that people get is punishment. Accusations get in trouble because they haven't told you earlier. All of those things just make it harder to tell you in the first place.
David Provan - cohost [49:17 - 50:43]
The third one here I had is field leadership. So this, this particular case was, you know, senior management were taking the reports and the. Their interactions with middle management on kind of face value. And so, you know, your field leadership process, which lets you senior management actually get close to the work itself is absolutely critical. If some of these senior managers have spent some time with some locate and mark crews a day in the life of these understood the reality of what was going on, you know, they, they may have, you know, learned quite quickly that what their middle management were telling them and what was in those reports was not a reflection of the reality. So, you know, re energizing your field leadership process. And you know, one of the things that I, I've tested as a thought exercise with some executive teams lately, Drew, is asking executive teams if, if you hypothetically, if there was three work crews doing the work that your organization does and they didn't have uniforms or logos on their shirts or their cars, and you could observe these three different crews doing their work, do you think you'd be able to identify which crew was from your company and the other two that weren't right, by the way that you observed them working? And it seems to go quite well with executive go. Oh, actually, you know, what would you look for? What would you expect to see? What would you notice that was different about your organization than others? And I think that's my expectation of senior leaders to be close enough to be able to recognize their business.
Drew Rae - cohost [50:43 - 50:45]
Oh, that is a fascinating test, David
David Provan - cohost [50:45 - 50:53]
You think a research paper, find three anonymous crews and get some senior leaders and set some behavioral markers and see what happens.
Drew Rae - cohost [50:53 - 51:10]
Oh, sorry. I'm immediately brought to mind of one of the field researchers we had out with a utility company where the way you would have spotted them is the workers owned by the company, all had water bottles given by the company. And all of the contractors had no water at all.
David Provan - cohost [51:10 - 51:12]
All no water bottles.
Drew Rae - cohost [51:12 - 51:14]
Probably not the best test for which are you. Because you.
David Provan - cohost [51:14 - 51:54]
But I'm always fascinated by the US reality TV show Undercover Boss where you get these CEOs of organizations that go out onto the front line of their business and are in shock and horror at what their organizations actually like. And I think, you know, in this case, senior leaders spending some, you know, locate and mark is a critical activity for a utility. For a utility organization. Right. This is like making sure no one messes up our stuff and seriously hurts themselves or members of the public. Right. So senior leaders should be close to how is this critical activity actually being performed? Right. Not what does the report say? Not what does my middle management say? What's actually going on.
Drew Rae - cohost [51:54 - 52:07]
Yeah. And just to highlight, there's a lot that's performative in those like, Undercover Boss things. It's not actually a recommendation to do that. The idea is to be as close enough to the work that you would find that stuff out anyway that you wouldn't need to go under to cover that you've.
David Provan - cohost [52:07 - 52:40]
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The fourth one I knew was just look at your action closure system. I shared a bit of an example on the way through this episode though. Overdue actions and things like that. But if you're. If your action tracking system and we can look at locate and mark as like an action closure system. If Your system showing 99% closed on time green. It's. It's just not reality. No organization resources to do all of this break in corrective action work that comes up all the time in safety. So your chance of that being looking good in reality, I think is very, very low.
Drew Rae - cohost [52:40 - 53:05]
Yeah. This is something that I've never been in favor of using closure as a safety metric. Obviously it's a bad thing in an organization for actions to be open indefinitely. So by all means, like have a date to make sure that each action you come back and you revisit and you check and you find out why it's open. But setting closure itself as a target just incentivizes bad behavior and doesn't create anything Good.
David Provan - cohost [53:05 - 54:03]
Yeah, yeah, 100%. And I guess the final point was thinking about hazard reporting. You know, in the paper, like when you say report hazards and you've got all observations and you've got a system in place in a safety system in place to report hazards. The question is, would something like this Even be in the scope of your routine reporting and learning process at point some. So if someone wanted to say we closed out some records that weren't in a system that we hadn't actually gone and done, your organization would even see that as a hazard or a safety incident or an event. So something might need to be done with our hazard observation reporting systems to get, you know, some of these. I'm going to use that word, you know, Diane Born's normalization of deviance. How's your system going to capture some of these deviances, if that's a word, you know, within your reporting system, so they can be kind of like learned about and actioned on? Because there'd be almost nowhere to go with this information.
Drew Rae - cohost [54:03 - 54:12]
Well, the place that. Place that people do have to go is your fraud reporting system. That's a very big step to report someone for fraud or code of conduct
David Provan - cohost [54:12 - 54:14]
*breaches or something like that. Yeah, yeah.
Drew Rae - cohost [54:14 - 54:21]
So if there's the option to highlight this as a general safety problem rather than, you know, a specific fraud, I think that makes it much easier to.
David Provan - cohost [54:21 - 54:59]
So having a, having a category of hazards that you call, literally call like these people called workarounds, you know, and, and publicly encouraging your company to tell us about your workarounds, tell us where the blue line is, is, is far away from the black line, if you want to use that sort of hop language. But I'd love an organization to go out and go just for the next six months. We want to find the workarounds in our, in our critical safety related activities that we're doing in the business. And if you had an open enough culture, I think you'd learn a, a heck of a lot about. Yeah. The reality of safety management in your business. Okay, Drew, so the question. Anything else you want to add?
Drew Rae - cohost [54:59 - 55:00]
No, that's good. Let's.
David Provan - cohost [55:01 - 55:04]
The question we asked this week was, are we lying about our safety performance?
Drew Rae - cohost [55:05 - 55:20]
Yes, 100% we are lying about our safety performance. The question we need to ask ourselves is have we thought about where and how we're incentivizing ourselves to do that? Just take for granted that we are lying. Just, just, yeah, go and find out what's causing those lies.
David Provan - cohost [55:21 - 55:46]
When we prepared this episode, my answer to that, if you had have asked me, was going to be probably. But it definitely also changed to 100% as we went through the discussion. So that's it for this week. We hope you found this episode thought provoking and ultimately useful in shaping the safety of work in your own organization. Join us on LinkedIn for a discussion or send any comments, questions or ideas for future episodes directly directly to us@feedbackafetyofwork.com.