The reluctance to drop one’s tools when threat intensifies, and the reasons behind not dropping them, is the focus of the paper we are examining in this episode. We are discussing the 1996 paper “Drop Your Tools: An Allegory for Organizational Studies” by Karl Weick. The paper compares and contrasts two tragic events involving firefighers who perished because they did not drop their tools to run (Mann Gulch, in 1949, and South Canyon in 1994) with ten principles laid out by James Thompson, the first editor of Administrative Science Quarterly.
The paper’s abstract reads:
The failure of 27 wildland firefighters to follow orders to drop their heavy tools so they could move faster and outrun an exploding fire led to their death within sight of safe areas. Possible explanations for this puzzling behavior are developed using guidelines proposed by James D. Thompson, the first editor of the Administrative Science Quarterly. These explanations are then used to show that scholars of organizations are in analogous threatened positions, and they too seem to be keeping their heavy tools and falling behind. ASQ's 40th anniversary provides a pretext to reexamine this potentially dysfunctional tendency and to modify it by reaffirming an updated version of Thompson's original guidelines.
The Mann Gulch fire was a wildfire in Montana where 15 smokejumpers approached the fire to begin fighting it, and unexpected high winds caused the fire to suddenly expand. This "blow-up" of the fire covered 3,000 acres (1,200 ha) in ten minutes, claiming the lives of 13 firefighters, including 12 of the smokejumpers. Only three of the smokejumpers survived.
The South Canyon Fire was a 1994 wildfire that took the lives of 14 wildland firefighters on Storm King Mountain, near Glenwood Springs, Colorado, on July 6, 1994. It is often also referred to as the "Storm King" fire.
Discussion Points:
Quotes:
“Our attachment to our tools is not a simple, rational thing.” - Drew
“It’s really hard to recognize that you’re well past that point where success is not an option at all.” - Drew
“These firefighters were several years since they’d been in a really raging, high-risk fire situation…” - David
“I encourage anyone to read Weick’s papers, they’re always well-written.” - David
“Well, I think according to Weick, the moment you begin to think that dropping your tools is impossible and unthinkable, that might be the moment you actually have to start wondering why you’re not dropping your tools.” - Drew
“The heavier the tool is, the harder it is to drop.” - Drew
Resources:
Karl Weick - Drop Your Tools Paper
The Safety of Work on LinkedIn
David: You're listening to The Safety of Work podcast episode 99. Today, we're asking the question, when is dropping your tools the right thing to do for safety? Let's get started.
Hi, everybody. My name is David Provan. I'm here with Drew Rae, and we're from the Safety Science Innovation Lab at Griffith University in Australia. Welcome to The Safety of Work podcast. In each episode, we ask an important question in relation to the safety of work or the work of safety, and we examine the evidence surrounding it.
Drew, episode 99, almost the big 100. Today, we're going to look at Karl Weick paper from 1996. Do you want to give us a little bit of background?
Drew: Sure. I'm pretty sure I don't have the episode in front of me. We've talked about Karl Weick before. He's intimately involved with the high reliability organizations research. He's also somewhat detached from that research in that he tends to have his own unique spin on talking about safety and organizations.
He's particularly strong in the sense-making area. For anyone who's read any Weick papers, they're works of literature themselves. He's a very poetic, literary-style writer who does sense-making through his work.
In this particular paper, he's drawing an analogy or metaphor between an incident that happened at Mann Gulch and the way in which theorists operate inside the space of administrative science. David, maybe you'd like to say a little bit about the Mann Gulch side of things.
David: I guess this is the connection. We'll talk a little bit about the paper and where it was published in a moment. Mann Gulch was (I guess) a place. In 1949, 13 wildland firefighters lost their lives. That was the Mann Gulch disaster.
In 1994, 14 more firefighters lost their lives in very similar conditions in South Canyon. These two fire fighting incidents, if you like, resulted in 27 fatalities—23 men, 4 women—where these teams of firefighters were overrun by fast moving, exploding fires.
In both situations, their retreat from danger or their retreat from the flames was slowed, because they failed to drop all of their heavy tools that they were carrying. By keeping, carrying their tools, like chainsaws and all their stuff that they've got, they lost valuable distance.
The argument is that both of these groups of firefighters lost their lives within sight of safe areas. In hindsight, it's this debate about whether they had just left all of their equipment behind, then they might have survived.
Drew, this is not just in the realm of firefighting. Weick also goes on to say that when threats intensifies in some industries, like navy seamen refuse orders to remove their heavy steel-toed shoes when they abandon a sinking ship, and fighter pilots sometimes, in disabled aircraft, refuse orders to eject, preferring to stay inside the cockpit.
There's this discussion that we want to have in this episode about, why would you, in a dangerous situation, stick to your guns in your normal mode of operation?
Drew: It's a really interesting space to think in, because it's both a metaphor, the idea of abandoning your tools, dropping your tools. It's also a real thing that happens. But then the explanations for the real thing are really quite often metaphorical themselves, because our attachment to our tools is not just a simple, rational thing.
It's bound up in a lot of other things to do with organization, belonging, and what makes us feel safe, what gives us our sense of identity. I personally find it a really interesting topic to talk in around this space around when people aren't fully rational but also when that lack of rationality makes a lot of sense in ways that we wouldn't call irrational either.
David: It's a great point, Drew. Maybe if I introduce the paper and then we can dive in, because this paper is used as an allegory or so between the research world and (I guess) the safety world. We've got a little bit of ground to cover. Drew, are you happy if I do that?
Drew: Yeah, go for it.
David: Like we said, the author of the paper is a single author, Karl Weick. The title of this paper is Drop Your Tools: An Allegory for Organizational Studies. It was published in the Administrative Science Quarterly in 1996.
Drew, ASQ is a very prestigious journal. I haven't been able to be published in that one yet. We did have one go at getting it in, but I'm getting one paper in there unsuccessfully. I don't know if you have been published in ASQ at all.
Drew: No, just one attempt. Really, it's a big enough journal that people aspire to be published in it, rather than just drop work in there because that's where it fits.
David: This was almost a 25–26-year-old paper. This was a special issue. It was the 40th anniversary edition of Administrative Science Quarterly. In that 40th anniversary, the editors were taking submissions around, typically, those sorts of milestones or points of reflections for journals about how far have we come and what does the future hold.
Weick submitted these papers and made some comments about where he felt organizational studies was at as a field and how it can move forward, and use these stories as his way of illustrating that.
Drew: Do you want to say anything more about the two fires themselves?
David: I think people could do it. I'm pretty sure, Drew, you did a disaster cast episode on Mann Gulch, because for some reason, I know a little bit about that. Usually, when I know a little bit about disasters, it's because you've done a disaster cast episode on it.
Mann Gulch. In August, 1949, 14 what they call smokejumpers. They basically plane in behind the fire line, they get dropped into the bush, and they start to try to clear breaks, backburner, and try to slow down and mitigate these very big wildfires in the forests of Western Montana.
Basically, these men, the fire turned, went fast moving up a steep slope. The majority of the firefighters involved were unable to escape. I think from memory, a couple of two of the firefighters had made their way through a very small gap in a cliff face. One of the other firefighters managed to lie down in a burnt area that they'd burnt while the fire went straight over the top, but all of the others passed away.
There was an order that was given in that moment to tell everyone to throw away your packs, throw away your heavy tools. In recounting the story, one of the survivors said, after this order have been given, I was very surprised that some of them wouldn't abandon any of their tools. Those firsthand accounts say, even some of the most experienced and intelligent of the crew continued carrying all of their tools. Drew, anything you want to say about Mann Gulch?
Drew: A couple of things. The first one is Weick himself has written about this fire previously, talking about sense-making around the idea of when you stop thinking that the fire is under control and start realizing that you yourself are actually in danger. He talked about the breakdown of organization as a way of trying to understand why the four men lit and escaped fire, jumped into it, and survived, but no one else followed him. Everyone else ran up that slope.
The other thing I thought was interesting was one of the guys who escaped was trying to get rid of a saw that he was carrying, but he was looking for somewhere appropriate to put it down. Even though the entire area was about to be engulfed in fire, he still doesn't want to just drop it, he wants to put it down properly. His inability to find the right place to put it is causing him distress.
David: Yeah. This is where people are so well-drilled, like look after your tools, don't just lay them on the ground. Even in an emergency situation, they are so well-drilled that there's something that you never do. You never just put your tools just anywhere on the ground. I think that was fascinating.
Drew, maybe we don't talk too much about South Canyon, but it was 45 years later, in 1994, roughly the same thing happened with another group of firefighters who ended up unable to outrun a fast moving fire that didn't behave in the way that they wanted it to. The firefighters who were killed in that were ones that didn't drop their tools or packs when they were trying to escape.
Drew: Weick lays out 10 different explanations for why people might exhibit this behavior. They range from the very prosaic to the really almost deeply philosophical. The very first one he says is, one reason why people might drop the tools is they couldn't hear the order.
David: This is where you said at the start of this episode, things become very complex. Well run through these 10. The first one is just listening. Someone's giving an order, but people don't hear it. It's just a basic miscommunication and the absence of an individual decision.
Drew: Yup. The second one is a little bit related, which is maybe just the lack of an explanation for the order. Dropping your tools is a fairly counterintuitive thing to do. Why should you follow a weird instruction about throwing away your tool when you're used to following the instructions, look after your tools, carry your tools, don't lose your tools. Unless you're given some clear reason, why would you do this counterintuitive thing?
David: It's that idea. You may not perceive the situation the same as someone else who's telling you to do something. It is very counterintuitive for these firefighters to, all their food, all their water, all their safety equipment, all their emergency equipment and leaving all that behind, unless people know exactly why they're doing that and that it is a matter of life and death, then they may be very reluctant to do that, even when given an order by a superior.
Drew: I'm not really convinced that the third one is particularly different from that. Maybe Weick wanted a nice round 10, but he then goes on to talk about. Maybe it's just about trust. Particularly in the Mann Gulch fire, the crew hadn't worked with their foreman.
They didn't really know whether he was an expert or not. Whereas they were used to trusting each other. If you don't trust the person who's giving you the order, you do trust the other people who aren't dropping their tools, then maybe you don't see the order as legitimate, authoritative, or worth listening to.
David: Good point. The idea is, what's the legitimacy of the instruction itself and the justification for that? And then, who's actually giving the order, providing the direction?
The fourth there is labeled control. This is where the firefighters may feel as if they lose a lot of control when they don't have any of those tools or any of that equipment with them. They just are more on certainty. Anything else you want to say about that, Drew?
Drew: Yeah. Just the idea that even having a tool gives you a capability. Weick talks about this a lot in his other paper, the idea that, when you've got the tools in your hand, you're a firefighter. When you don't have the tool, now you're no longer a firefighter. You're just someone who is running away from the fire. Tools give you capabilities. Getting rid of tools is abandoning capability, it's abandoning an ability.
David: Drew, number five is labeled skill at dropping. This is what we mentioned a little bit earlier. The first one is actually knowing how to drop the tools. One of the people who survived the Mann Gulch fire mentioned that even though he was running for his life, when he grabbed the shovel of someone, he looked around and leant up against a tree rather than just throwing the shovel on the ground.
Even in his reflections on the incident, he said, that seems very crazy now. But at the moment, it seemed like a very logical thing for me to have to do. You have to find a tree to lean this shovel up against.
Drew: Yeah. He says he remembers thinking that I can't believe I'm doing this. I can't believe I'm putting down my saw. What a weird thing to do, but yeah, he did it and was one of the two people who narrowly escaped. They were only a few meters ahead of the fire when they found a crack to get through and made their way out.
David: The sixth is still with what the sixth reason for not dropping tools in these situations, Weick labeled as possibly this idea of skill with the replacement activity. If I don't have my tools, I'm in a very unfamiliar situation. If I don't have my fire shelter to deploy and I have to make do, I may not have the skill at doing something in the absence of my equipment.
What I was thinking about in this one is they train people in how to use all the equipment they've got, but they may not train people in how to get the same outcome when they don't have any of their equipment. People just might not know what to do.
Drew: He particularly mentions in the South Canyon fire, the idea of firefighters not wanting to deploy fire shelters. They're carrying two sets of equipment. Part of their equipment is to fight the fire, the other is to help them survive the fire. Actually, they get far more practice at firefighting than deploying a fire shelter and just lying down in it. It's switching from something that's familiar to something that's unfamiliar.
David: Now a little bit more identity related or internalized. The seventh reason Weick labeled as failure. “To drop one's tools may be to admit failure,” was the quote in there. If I'm throwing my tools away, that means that we failed at our job and I failed at basically not getting myself into the situation that I now find myself in.
Drew: I think along with that, there's always a fear. Not that you've already failed, but that you haven't already failed. You always fear that maybe if we kept fighting, maybe if we kept going, we might succeed. It's really hard to recognize that you're well past that point, where success is not an option at all, but you fear you're just on the other side of that line.
David: Interestingly, what I didn't realize until I read this paper, in both of those situations, the fire season previous had been a very light fire season. These firefighters were a couple of years since they've been in a really raging, high-risk fire situation. If you've had that much success for a couple of years, he also said that maybe they weren't as experienced at sizing up the imminent danger that they found themselves in.
Drew: All their recent experience was you fight hard and you win. They hadn't had experiences before where they'd had to give up, retreat, and try again in a different time.
David: The eighth one is labeled as social dynamics. This is this idea of if other people are holding their tools, then I should probably keep. Why would I do something that steps outside the rest of the group norm? This becomes really, really difficult.
I think there's some other research here around stopping work when something's unsafe, where it's very hard if other people seem to be just progressing as normal. It's very hard to be the one that steps out of the line of the social dynamic.
Drew: Weick particularly talks about the idea that people in a line can exaggerate that, because someone else has had the opportunity to be first and is past up on that opportunity, and you're next. You might imagine, say for example, people crossing a stream. The first person crosses, second person crosses, third person crosses. The fourth person doesn't want to be the one who says, hold on, I think this is too deep, maybe I shouldn't go across, even if the water has been getting deeper and deeper each time. But the precedent has been set by other people.
David: I was going to mention at the end, but maybe now is appropriate. There's some research in airline studie,s and pilots, where the first pilot to make the diversion decision because the weather is too bad and we're not going to land at this airport, we're going to divert to a different airport. If 15 minutes in front has landed, the plane in front has landed, it's very hard for that first pilot to make that call that says, well, actually, no, it's not safe now, but it was safe 15 minutes ago.
When they do the research on it, as soon as one person makes the call, then all of the other people behind also find it much easier to make that decision as well. It can be very hard to be that first person to step out of the momentum of what's going on.
Drew: That one's really interesting.
David: The ninth one has consequences. In this, he said that people may not drop their tools if they believe doing so won't make much of a difference. This idea that if I'm always running around and walking around in the bush with my tools and my backpack getting rid of them I may not actually be that much faster.
The math here is interesting. I think when they did some trials, it looks like after South Canyon, they said without their equipment, they might have been able to move about 8 inches or 25 centimeters more per second. A lot lighter and longer strides. In the time that they had, they probably would have been able to get another 230-odd feet, which would have put them over the top of the mountain or close to the top at South Canyon. Just literally that 100 meters extra may have been the difference.
Drew: Funnily enough, when you're running away from a fire, you don't have time to stop and do math. I'm just just now picturing some guy saying, you drop your tools and the other one says, it won't make much difference. Let's say they're arguing for five minutes about whether it will or will not make a difference.
David: Again, I think this is interesting. In terms of planning for the unexpected in organizations, what would have been interesting is to take these firefighters and have them run up a hill with all their gear on in time them, then take them back the next day without the gear and have them run up the hill, and be able to show them and help everyone understand how different options can create different outcomes, because I'm sure that maybe, again, these groups just may not know that there is a speed difference.
Drew: Particularly if it's a small difference and you don't know in the end of it, it's only going to be a few 100 yards that make a difference.
David: I'd probably want that 100 yards if it was me running away from a fire.
Drew: Absolutely.
David: The 10th one, the last one here is identity. It's this idea that you mentioned a little bit earlier that basically the tools and the equipment that firefighters have are central to their identity as a firefighter. Having these tools is part of the membership of the group.
It's the reason that these firefighters are deployed in the first place. They're deployed with their tools to manage fire situations. Once they drop those tools, then they're almost throwing away their identity as a firefighter.
Drew: The moment I read this, I was thinking in particular of the fact that the Mann Gulch firefighters, this is only very shortly after World War II. All of these guys have trained, even if not all of them have deployed as soldiers during the war.
As a soldier, it's the act of a coward to throw away your weapons and run away. There may have been much of the same feeling that once you abandon the thing that you fight the fire with, you're alienating yourself from the group as someone who's not living up to the standards and the identity.
David: These are the 10 reasons. I'm not quite sure how Weick decided that those were the 10. This might just be him offering up some of his own thoughts and explanations around this.
I think we can see that there's potentially a whole bunch of complex information processing, decision-making processes that go on inside individuals in these really time-critical, high-risk situations. Anything else you want to say about that before we move on?
Drew: Let's move on to talk about a little bit of the point that Weick is trying to make through this discussion.
David: Okay. Like we said, he used this example. He wanted to talk about the current state of organizational studies and the 40 years of Administrative Science Quarterly. I don't know all the background, but going on Weick's paper, the first editor—what do you call the head editor of a journal, Drew?
Drew: I believe at the time, it was just editor. But today, we call them editor-in-chief.
David: Okay. The editor-in-chief said—Thompson was the name—there are four principles that I want Administrative Science Quarterly to be serving (if you like). Should we go through each of these four? The first was talking about how Administrative Science should focus on relationships. Drew, do you want to talk a little bit about that?
Drew: I think this is partly in, as a way of distinguishing Administrative Science from other ways of looking at organizations like economics. One of the key ideas of Administrative Science is that you can't understand an organization just by looking at what's the financial bottom line and how do they achieve that. You need to understand how structures, people, and how those things interact, and then also the relationships between different variables, between different things that are going on.
David: I think that's exactly right. In terms of this idea of focusing on relationships, not just on one individual, the bottom line, or something like that, but going actually, organizations are these pluralist, interdependent social structures that, to understand how they function, we can rarely just look at one particular aspect of it. We're better off looking at the relationship between multiple aspects.
So, what does it mean? What is the relationship between (for example) the financial bottom line of the business and the risk-taking, decision-making of managers within that organization? As an example, try to think about what are the relationships between multiple aspects of an organization?
Drew: The second value is the idea of abstract concepts. What he means by that is, as opposed to focusing too much on just very single concrete events or single concrete ideas. This is the importance of building theories that can apply across multiple situations and contribute to the field rather than trying to solve the problems of one organization.
David: It'd be this idea that we might do this particular study where we see people doing a lot of safety work activity in their organization. The hope was here is that, in organizational studies field, people would observe that particular aspect of organizations or create an experiment around a particular aspect of an organization and use the findings or the observations from that to actually start to (like you say) build some theory around how the organizations function more broadly so that (in this instance) be able to predict how general organizations might function in relation to these aspects.
Drew: The third principle or value is one that I really love, which is the development of operational definitions that bridge concepts and raw experience. It's really interesting to read that one in this paper because what Thompson is criticizing is the idea of very vague, literary ideas. That is actually what Weick is all about. You see, Weick was trying to reimagine this principle a little bit to fit his own idea of how it should work.
This is the whole idea of having the science in Administrative Science. The idea of, instead of just vague, fluffy things filled with confirmation bias, setting out clearly what you mean, defining what you mean in ways that you can then test it, expand it, and apply it.
David: I guess Thomson originally would that have been in the mid-50s. I'm not sure. He'd be too happy with 30 years of safety culture research, which is still yet to be.
Drew: It's funny. With the safety culture, I immediately thought of that.
David: We're talking about developing operational definitions. We don't really have a definition of some of the important languages that were used in safety.
Drew: In safety, we love to have working definitions rather than operational definitions.
David: The fourth one is the principle that this value is discussed. What's the value of the problem that we're understanding and solving? Drew, do you want to say any more about that? The criteria and problem.
Drew: I struggle a little bit with what exactly either Thomson or Weick mean with the language here. In the elaboration, they talk particularly about what is the actual service that researchers are trying to provide. He talks about the need to get away from trying to be too immediately useful in the short term.
We should be finding general principles that apply over multiple situations, so understanding relationships between things that can be generalized rather than trying to just be very immediately have people pick up our research and use it.
David: I think it's also about how we focus on understanding one particular aspect of the organization. In reality, Weick's also talking about that very rarely organizations are aligned and focusing on just one thing. Perhaps, we need to understand when we are looking at one thing and when we are looking at a broad set of aspects of our organization.
Drew, do we want to talk a little bit about how Weick relates these incidents to those four principles?
Drew: Yes. This is almost like a transition point in the paper in that he takes these research principles, applies them back to his 10 reasons for dropping off the tools, and then he makes a shift forward again to look at what this means for researchers themselves. I think the most concrete and useful thing we can do is this discussion about dropping the tools in literal sense.
The first thing he says is that the fact that he's come up with a list of 10 things, that's where that first principle comes in of understanding relationships. We shouldn't be just throwing out 10 reasons and saying, okay, which one of these 10 reasons is correct?
He says, and the language correctly is, people have multiple interdependent, socially coherent reasons for doing what they do. All 10 of these reasons could be true at once. They don't contradict each other that we don't have to pick one.
David: It could be, I didn't hear the instruction, I'm looking at what other people are doing, I've got my identity as a firefighter that I'm worried about, I don't know what to do if I don't have the tool. This idea that a model of behavior isn't just ABC, like antecedent behavior consequence or one of these really simple linear models of decision making in behavior, so there's a focus on relationships and multiple truths. Do you want to go to the second?
Drew: The second one is applying that principle of using abstract concepts. He says, if there are multiple ways people relate to tools and use to tools, then to understand this, to use it to compare Mann Gulch to South Canyon, and then to go forward to other things in firefighting, then to go forward again to other settings that aren't firefighting. We need to find more abstract concepts.
You can't be as literal as should you or shouldn't you drop your tools based on whether you know that you can run 10 meters faster or not. But if we go up to higher level concepts, then things like justification, trust, and identity, those are both more abstract but also more widely applicable. And then we can look.
There are other ways of looking at identity other than what your tools are. But in this particular example, identity and tools are closely related. There are other ways of looking at trust than to whether you obey this one particular order. Trust is really important for how people decide to do what they do in organizations.
David: These abstract concepts in the third principle is we can then use these abstract concepts and tie them to concrete action. Weick goes on to say, well, so justification? How long and deep has the briefing been with the firefighters regarding what the suppression strategy actually should be? The trust is, to what extent is there a willingness amongst the crews to follow unusual orders given by potentially strangers that they're working with, and then this identity?
This preoccupation with this reputation is it ‘can do’ firefighter. These people who jump out of planes and in behind fires, parachutes and chainsaws, they’re people who identify as getting stuff done. This idea of concrete action can follow these abstract concepts. Firefighting organizations can think about, well, do we need to do anything with our formal and informal structures to change any of these things?
Drew: I think he might be making an even bigger point there about the relationship between theory and concrete action. He's warning that some people like to study things at the level of concrete action. How long should briefings be? Other people like to just theorize and talk about vague concepts like identity.
He's saying that the correct path is you start by zooming out and finding these abstract concepts. But then you turn them into very measurable predictions that, once we've got an idea like the idea of justification, we can then test things that arise from that.
If we spend more around justifying, does that improve people's following of orders? If we spend more time building and reframing identity, does that change people's following of these sorts of orders? That both uses the theory to come up with actions, but also uses the concrete actions to test the theory.
David: And he talked about Weick in relating it back to Thompson's original principles and said, it should always be both. Just pursuing these abstractions and theories or just pursuing the particulars by themselves is not going to give you a picture of an organization or a useful working model of organizations. You need to be looking at the relationships and the bridges between these abstractions and the concrete action.
The fourth is this criterion problem. This is, what are we focused on? What criteria or what are we focused on? In the tool dropping situation, it says that even though the obvious criterion of survival, which is in that situation, everyone in the team "should" be focused on survival as the number one point of attention. That's not actually the case. It doesn't mean that everyone is focused on that at the same time as their only priority.
There are all sorts of other priorities and things taking attention, like fire line construction, efficiency, the speed of what they're doing, obstacles, and risks. They all compete for attention. Because the whole crew is not engaged on that number one or that single criteria of survival at the same time can mean it's very hard to get these universal orders, like dropping tools and that to happen quickly and to happen across the whole team.
Drew: I think that that's a really important lesson for safety that we need to keep learning over and over again. In safety, we often fell to that really obvious criterion of what keeps people physically safe. We often want people to just ignore all of these other things that we know are salient and important to them.
David: Drew, we've got these 10 reasons from Weick as to why people may not drop their tools when faced with imminent danger. Weick has then connected them back to these four original principles for the ASQ journal, and then goes on to talk about what it means for researchers in organizational studies. Do you want to lead this part of the conversation?
Drew: Sure. I'll talk a little bit about this. To be honest, I think this is one of those areas where the allegory is really interesting, but the moment you start to fully apply it rather than keeping it as a vague metaphor, it becomes a little bit stretched.
The first question Weick asks is, okay, what is the research equivalent of the fire that threatened to overtake the fire jumpers? He says, what is the actual crisis that is facing people doing research into organizations? He puts up two threats, both of which I find interesting. One of the threats is by companies themselves. The other threat is from economists.
Weick is really, really worried about Administrative Science. Today, we'd probably almost call it like sociology of organizations rather than being wiped out either by people within organizations or by people in economics departments. Why might this be the case?
He says that knowledge creation inside companies tends to be very company-specific and problem-specific, meaning that each company has to reinvent the wheel for itself. There's not a lot of abstract knowledge, which has been created and preserved when companies do organizational improvement.
He says, this is why lots of quality interventions fail because organizations just aren't willing to put in the expense and difficulty of doing proper evaluation. Even if they do that, it becomes very vulnerable to political manipulation, because everyone within the company, your main objective is not actually to generate abstract pure knowledge or trying to gain personal advantage and company advantage. You're not going to have that purity that research has.
As a result, people tend to take shortcuts in assessing things. Learning tends to be somewhat based on superstition. I love this phrase, what appears to be knowledge creation, in fact, becomes the enlargement of ignorance. No offense to people working within companies, but that really is how researchers see companies trying to do improvement often. We see what we see as shortcuts, like not really willing to evaluate.
He says, so what that should be, is, if that's the case, if companies aren't very good at this, then it shouldn't be like boom time for universities. People doing organizational studies then should have a very clear role, a very clear differentiator, or a very clear value-add. But he says, that's not the case, because researchers tend to get caught up in doing things the way companies are doing them and trying to tell companies what they feel they already know, instead of doing the research side of things.
He says, if that happens, if researchers want to behave too business-like, too much like businesses do their improvement, then you've got two groups doing the same thing. You can probably get rid of one of them. That's what he sees as the fire, this risk of administrative science and organizational studies in sociology of organizations making themselves irrelevant by being too much like consultants, and just being not as good at being consultants as businesses are themselves.
David: Drew, this was 25–26 years ago, this paper. What do you see in the universities today? What do you see? Do you see universities maybe in our disciplines that are closely connected with industry? Do you see that the research is true to the role of research or do you see it being more organization-like?
Drew: Let me give two responses. The first one is, I think his prediction has largely come true, and that lots of these research groups have been wiped out. But weirdly, I think the ones that have survived are the ones that are closest to being consultancies rather than the ones that are doing this abstract research. I don't know how true or not true his explanation is, but his prediction certainly was very true.
David: Okay. We've got these this trend in relation to organizational studies research itself. Where do you want to go to now?
Drew: If that's the fire, what's the heavy tool that he thinks that we should get rid of? He puts up lots of candidates because he says, basically, the researchers all agree that we should get rid of the heavy tools. They just don't agree with what counts as the heavy tools.
But I think if I'm reading correctly, what Weick settles on is he continues this link between tools and identity. He says that the heaviest tools are the ones where we mix up our identity with our theoretical positions. He particularly says that we get all of these dualities.
He gives the example of the macro and the micro view. In safety, the obvious duality to call out here is Safety I and Safety II. He says, we've got these existing dualities. But when they harden into positions which people identify with—that's where they get their identity then from—then the tools within those positions take on a lot of extra weight, which makes it harder to drop them, because they're both heavier and they're identity-bound.
He says a couple of other things. He says that attention is deflected for ideas to people and attention is drawn towards the field's internal issues instead of the external threats. I'm just seeing more and more parallels here to the fight between Safety I and Safety II, David.
I don't know about you, but I think that's exactly what he's talking about. Your identity gets wrapped up in one side of the duality and in having the fight within the duality instead of thinking about what's the actual threat coming from the outside.
David: I was thinking as you're saying that, Drew. I think it has gone from ideas to people. You've got Resilience Engineering in Dave woods, you've got Safety Differently in Sidney Dekker, Safety II in Erik Hollnagel, and HOP in Todd Conklin. We've actually taken these ideas, and we now talk about people.
Now it's like, if you say, I don't like this idea, you can almost be saying, well, you don't like this person. Or if you do like that person, then maybe you don't want to say, I don't like this idea. It becomes very unscience-like from then forward.
I think that's one of the big problems in connecting safety back to safety sciences. We've got exactly what Weick said in this paper 25 years down the track in safety. We've got this tight coupling of ideas and people and internal issues in the discipline.
Drew: I don't know how far the metaphor can be stretched. What would dropping the tools look like? Weick says it involves going back to those principles that Thompson was encouraging.
Focusing on the study of relationships, using the abstract concepts, having that constant bridge between the abstract concept, and the concrete predictions and concrete examples rather than treating them independently. And then thinking about, what are your values that matter? What's always the link between these other things we're doing and the creation of those ultimate values? He says that focusing on those things, that's what will restore likeness.
David: Drew, do you want to talk about anything else, or do we want to try do some practical takeaways?
Drew: David, there was just one other thought I had while I was going through this, which not everyone who listens to the podcast is a researcher. Some of this paper is speaking directly to people with tools, some of this paper is speaking directly to people who do research. I thought there was something in the middle that I thought neatly fit this example of dropping tools, and that is the idea of risk assessment.
Going through all 10 of Weick's explanations for why people don't drop their tools could also be seen as explanations for why people are reluctant to give up things like quantitative risk assessment. This is something that is genuinely heavy. This is something that slows people down, takes up time and attention, and people would be lighter and could move more easily if they got rid of it.
But we don't necessarily trust the people that are telling us to get rid of it. They give us an illusion of control. We feel that having this tool gives us power. We might just not have the skill to drop it or more likely the skill with the replacement activity.
The first question someone asks when you say get rid of your risk assessment is, what am I going to do instead? And then we have this idea of failure, that dropping something that you've been using for a long time is admitting that it hasn't worked, that it failed, that you're not doing your job well. And then all of the social dynamics. How can I get rid of it if other people are still using it, if the customer's still demanding it, if the client's still demanding it?
David: If anyone does pick up this paper and gives it a read—and I encourage you to read any Weick's stuff because it's all always well-written—I think you can think about any of your safety work activity in your business, whether it's audits, risk assessments, investigations or all those, and read those 10 reasons. Even if it's not being helpful for you in your organization, why it might be very hard to get rid of. We probably could have used these 10 when we did the safety clutter work and done a nice tie in there as well about why decluttering is so hard.
Drew: It'd be interesting to compare that structure to what we said and see where the gaps are. Do we have any takeaways?
David: I was focused on the 10 reasons for not dropping your tools. The first thing I thought of was the hot and cold cognition work. There's some work in the 1960s started with Abelson. There's this idea that there are information processing and decision-making processes, there are emotional processes, and there are cognitive processes.
Where I think Weick's list of 10 things were quite good is just to show that even when we think of something like, well, if the fire is coming for you, drop your tools to run away, is very complex, emotional, and cognitive processes.
On the cognitive side, you've got, did I hear the person? Do I know how to drop the tools? Do I know what to do instead? These kinds of logical cognitive information processing. And then you've got the emotional, the identity, the failure, the trust, and the justification. I think it's just knowing that in operational decisions, there's a complex series of both emotional and cognitive information processes going on in individuals and teams.
Drew: I think we could definitely apply these 10 things, particularly, to decisions about change and when we're asking someone else to change. There's been a lot of work and people (I think) today are more ready to think about things like readiness for change. But I think we still think that we can overcome that readiness just by persuading people that the change is a good thing.
I think these 10 reasons could give us a lot of genuine empathy for why people might be reluctant to give up what they're currently doing in order to change. These are real needs that need to be met. Until we meet those needs, then people are not going to be able to drop their tools and move on to the next thing.
David: I agree, Drew. I think sometimes we think of change, even though we know it's a very emotional process. A lot of our change management approach in organization are very cognitive and transactional. Here's the justification. This idea of, well, do I trust the person who's asking me to change, and what does this mean for my role if I have to do a process different that is very core to my role and experience? I like that one, Drew. Thank you.
The second one I had here was around understanding social and group dynamics. In this situation, the first person to react, respond, and do something very out of the ordinary needs to break with a norm or a convention. I'm thinking is that plane diversion example that I gave earlier, but also I thought about Piper Alpha as well.
The very first person who decided that, well, I'm not going to evacuate to the accommodation module because I'll burn to death inside that module, so I'm going to break the emergency procedure. I'm going to break the rule, and I'm going to jump off the platform into the North Sea. I could just imagine the first person to just abandon the platform, and then a whole lot of other people followed and also jumped into the water.
It’s that idea of knowing that the first person to break with that norm, that's a really big step for that first person to take. The first firefighter just throw away their tools and started running in a panic. It's like telling someone just to stop the work when it's unsafe. When a whole group is thinking that their work is safe and one person wants to call it, that's a really hard thing to do in a group.
Drew: I can never think of the Piper Alpha example without thinking of that. If all your friends were jumping off a cliff, would you jump off too? My immediate thought was, well, if there's a reason that's good enough that's got all of my friends jumping off a boiling oil rig, then maybe that's a reason enough for me to jump as well. But for that first render jump, they haven't got anyone else to follow to set the example.
David: And I think that's a good analogy. I think that the first person to jump takes a big step, and then it's also another big step for other people to follow. Even in this case, if someone's ordering you to drop your tools or ordering you to do something. Even to follow someone who's doing something quite out of the ordinary also takes another big step as well.
The takeaway there is just understanding and reading widely the research on social and group dynamics and thinking about what it means or how you're approaching safety in your organization.
Drew: There are only a couple of takeaways, David, but they're pretty big ones. Is there anything else you wanted to put?
David: No. What I took the most out of in this paper was the information processing at an individual level, and then obviously the group dynamics around that, and just how complex as with everything involving people in safety, how complex all that is. Drew, the question we asked this week was, when is dropping your tools the right thing to do for safety?
Drew: I think according to Weick, the moment you begin to think that dropping your tools is impossible and unthinkable, that might be the moment you have to actually start wondering why you're not dropping your tools. As he says with the academics, the heavier the tool is, the harder it is to drop. The fact that it's hard may also be an indication that it's quite heavy.
David: That's good. My short answer is just going to be when you need to run fast away from a fire.
Drew: Know when you're standing at the top of a building on a construction site with no edge protection.
David: Probably not a good thing to do in that situation. Drew, that's it for this week. Before we wrap up, next fortnight, episode 100. We won't spoil what that is, but we've got a bit of a plan. 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 for the discussion on LinkedIn or send any comments, questions, or ideas for future episodes to feedback@safetyofwork.com.