Several years ago I was introduced to the idea of Safety (and here) and its importance to culture by my good friend Amr Elssamadisy. At the time, he gave a talk on culture and safety was one of the essential ingredients. In 2013, Amr did an interview with Joshua Kerievsky from Industrial Logic on Anzen and Safety in Software.
Around the same time, I started following the work of Daniel Mezick who has been talking about Culture and Safety for several years. Daniel also dedicated portions of his book The Culture Game on this topic (chapter 4, keep it safe) and organized the agileCultureCon with a focus on team and organizational culture. Daniel also did an interview on engagement and how safety and open space drive engagement.
As serendipity would have it, I picked up the book The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg sometime last year. In his book, Duhigg tells the story of Alcoa’s CEO Paul O’Neil who focused on safety with the metric of “Zero Injuries” to turn the company around. O’Neil made it all about Safety from the time he became CEO until the time he left the company. In fact, it is reported that when he retired, 13 years later, Alcoa’s annual net income was five times higher than when he started.
Earlier this year, I was at Agile and Beyond and I got to hear Joshua Kerievsky speak about modern agile and his interview with Paul O’Neil which was one of the inspiration behind “Make Safety a Prerequisite” one of the guiding principles for modern agile.
There was a lot of buzz at #agile2016 about the keynote on #modernagile and the focus on Safety. The quote about a culture of fear below got retweeted more than a few hundred times.
This seems to have resonated with so many but what does a culture of fear look like?
Interestingly enough, I am reading Slack, a book by Tom Demarco that was published in January 2001 and he has dedicated a full chapter on the Culture of Fear. He describes the characteristics of the Culture of Fear organization as follows (chapter 13, pg 87–88):
- It is not safe to say certain things (e.g., “I have serious doubts that this quota can be met”). And truth is no excuse for saying them.
- In fact, being right in your doubts proves that you must be the reason that the fondest wishes of those above you did not come true.
- Goals are set so aggressively that there is virtually no chance of achieving them.
- Power is allowed to trump common sense.
- Anyone can be abused and abased for a failure to knuckle under.
- The people who are fired are, on average, more competent than the people who aren’t.
- The surviving managers are particularly angry lot. Everyone is terrified of crossing them.
He ends this paragraph by saying, “I hope that as you read these points you’re inclined to think they present a truly extreme picture. I hope this, since it suggests that yours is not a Culture of Fear organization. (If the portrait I’ve drawn does not seem extreme to you, you have my sympathies.)”
What makes Safety a prerequisite for a culture of innovation?
The Harvard Business Review (HBR) published an article earlier this year titled: The Most Important Leadership Competencies, According to Leaders Around the World. The question researchers were trying to answer was: “What makes an effective leader?”. The first round of the study asked 195 leaders in 15 countries over 30 global organizations to choose the 15 most important leadership competencies from a list of 74. Guess what was #1 on the list. That’s right, it was “Strong ethics & Safety”.
The study goes to say that; “In a safe environment employees can relax, invoking the brain’s higher capacity for social engagement, innovation, creativity, and ambition.”
OK, still not convinced. On January 16, 2013, Canada launched a new national standard on psychological health and safety in the workplace.
What does it take to make Safety a prerequisite?
It starts with leaders. Simeon Sink in his ted talk: Why good leaders make you feel safe? says, “We call them leaders because they go first. We call them leaders because they take the risk before anybody else does. We call them leaders because they will choose to sacrifice so that their people may be safe and protected.”
Just like the story of Paul O’Neil at Alcoa as he cared about making a positive impact and did not only talk about Safety but insisted and followed through until it created ripple effects that would change the culture for good.
