Did a Must-Do Attitude Contribute to Collisions ? | U.S. Naval Institute
▻https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2017-09/did-must-do-attitude-contribute-collisions
Dans les Proceedings de l’USNI, un questionnement très axé sur la sociologie des organisations autour des abordages des #USS_Fitzgerald et #USS_John_S_McCain
Il commence par affirmer :
It is likely that technical failure played little or no role.
This is why we hypothesize that both warships had information that they were standing into danger, which, if acted upon, would have avoided the collisions.
With that hypothesis in mind, the following are three areas of inquiry for the Navy investigators:
• What were the barriers to speaking up at the operator level? If there was information on the warship and it was known to operators, did they voice it? If they kept it to themselves, what got in the way of their speaking up? Specifically, the question to be answered is what were the organizational and cultural factors that presented obstacles to saying something. This should not be an investigation into the performance or character flaws of the particular operator; this is an inquiry into the practices around expressing dissenting and differing opinions.
• What were the barriers to taking action at the officer level? If information was voiced, why was it dismissed or not acted upon? To what degree was there a bias against action by the bridge teams, as evidenced by their day-to-day interactions with the captain? The investigation should examine the language used among the officers and between the teams and the captains. The mindset of decision-makers relative to performance goals should be probed. Was their objective to achieve excellence—what psychologists call a performance-approach mindset—or was it to avoid errors, which psychologists call a performance-avoid mindset? Understanding this is important, because studies have correlated performance-avoid mindsets with worse outcomes. This is an inquiry into the practices around initiative and action.
• What were the barriers to certification at the command level? The Navy has a process for readiness that requires the captain and the commodore to certify that the ship is ready to deploy. The question is how rigorous are those certifications, and how many of the previous ones resulted in failures. How often in the past three years, for example, were ships delayed in deploying because of inadequacies in training readiness? No certifying officer wants to rush a ship out on deployment that isn’t ready, but reporting up the Navy chain that a ship will not make a deployment date is also embarrassing and comes at a cost to professional reputation. If ships never fail certification then this step is simply another performance step preceding deployment. This is an inquiry into the practices of speaking truth to power.
[…]
The thrust of the three areas of inquiry listed here is to see if Navy crews, like the El Faro crew, are trapped in production work. It is natural to want to do our jobs well, and we don’t want to feel like failures. We don’t want to tell our bosses we can’t do something. This is particularly true for the men and women of the U.S. Navy, which is a #can-do organization. Unfortunately, this dedication to doing can result in a #must-do attitude that sometimes clouds judgment. That is worth investigating.
