When difficulties, failure or even an accident strike, the temptation is great to look for, if not a “scapegoat”, at least a “culprit”, inside or outside. A close cousin of the temptation of the providential man, this reflex is nonetheless ineffective and demobilising.
Our world is technologically fast, powerful, digitised and interconnected. And at the same time still human, and therefore subject to the irrational – whether generous, creative or destructive. Faced with this double complexity, humility and determination – and often courage – are the paths to follow in order to create value, set available resources in motion, overcome obstacles and mobilise energies.
Yet, faced with difficulties – and perhaps because of them – some choose passivity, immobility, disengagement. In the business world (and in civic life), many deplore this and blame “managers” who cannot give meaning to work, or organisations that make collective functioning more complex (or, often, renew it without supporting the transformations it entails). Culprits. Yet this disengagement is often the choice of rent-seekers, by situation or by status. Or of spoilt children, or of “free riders”. Culprits too?
Turning to the providential man (or woman – that is not the point) is one face of this irresponsible passivity, so alien to the vital impulse of value creation. Because expecting everything from a third party perceived as omniscient, even omnipotent, is historically – and even more so in our modern world – naive at best, if not delusional.
The other face is the search for a culprit. Not necessarily a traditional, usual culprit, as conspiracy theorists of all stripes love – fanatics of “domination”, whether historically constructed or occult. Someone who makes it easy to note the failure, or even to find a source of compensation. But once the culprit has been found, what then?
Faced with complexity, accepting indeterminism
Because the causalism implicit in this reasoning is terribly simplistic and reductive. How many facts actually have a single cause?
The complexity of the world is inseparable from a large measure of indeterminism, which must be accepted. Humbly. And which forces us to get to work: because while the ideal cannot be reached, it deserves to be set as a heading, provided it is acknowledged as such – unattainable in truth, but a guide for action. Because few companies still have the luxury of rent, passivity or dependence on others.
Our country can pride itself on producing elites capable of magnificent conceptual reasoning, who provide brilliant solutions to complex problems. Since the 18th century, our engineering schools have made it possible to develop technological innovations that have made our country rich and spread throughout the world. And our schools of administration and management, transposing the sciences of machines to human affairs, have managed to generate systems of a complexity that leaves many people astonished.
Cartesian tradition, Newtonian causalism, historical pride – yet implementation often remains far from the perfect solution… So, when socio-technical complexity resists the concept, the “fault” must be attributed to its weak link: the human factor, whose natural intelligence will tomorrow have to give way to artificial intelligence (because today, and no doubt for a long time to come, this is more a concept designed to raise funds on the back of a technophile fantasy that excuses the need for immediate results than an operational reality). For now, people are “trained” and boxed in by procedures that are ever more disempowering (and ineffective). Tomorrow, will they be replaced?
Preventing accidents or punishing culprits?
Modern approaches and practices in aviation, naval and industrial safety can, however, usefully inform thinking in every field.
In the event of a failure or accident, the search for culprits inevitably leads to silence and concealment – and therefore makes it harder to identify dysfunctions that are more often generated by the organisation itself, or by the complexity of socio-technical systems, than by identified and conveniently available “culprits”. Because while the search for “human error” often aims to exonerate the organisation, where, in an analysis after the fact, is the “real” culprit: the operator, the team, management, planning, additional training, profitability constraints, recruitment, initial training, education, politicians, voters, the media…?
In the French Air Force, for several years now, and in many other organisations facing both complexity and life-and-death stakes, incident reporting has been protected by a system that anonymises testimony. Because preventing another accident matters more than “punishing” deviation from the norm – provided, of course, it is not an act of malice.
Simplistic and therefore a source of error, the search for a culprit is also demotivating, because it is almost always accompanied by an increase in regulations and procedures that make life more complicated for organisations and their people, thicken the “fog of action” and fail to value the ingenuity of those who ensure that, in the end, “it works”. When the risk of “saving the system” by departing from the rules becomes untenable for individuals, the best strategy becomes immobility and disengagement.
The theme of team engagement thus seems to be coming back into fashion among management questions – one cyclical return among others, which probably shows the maturity of the field.
To promote this engagement, some champion the role of a “leader” (a highly polysemous term), obviously charismatic, who must set the course, give meaning, reassure. And probably – though this is not always made explicit or acknowledged – guarantee obedience through alignment. A providential man, and also a judge of guilt. Until the day he too finds himself in the dock… Fawned over, dropped, lynched…
Creative diversity rather than disempowering alignment
Yet the technological and organisational complexity of modern systems has gone hand in hand with the unfolding of the democratic paradigm, which combines many people’s desire to take a direct part in affairs with a higher level of general education – or at least the diffuse but shared feeling of greater competence.
That is why, rather than giving in to the double temptation of the totalitarian man and the search for culprits, it is more appropriate and effective to rely on the richness and diversity of the company’s groups – formal or extended – to face complexity and, in the search for solutions, to generate individual and collective commitment over the long term.
By innovating both in management convictions and in facilitation practices, in order to generate – beyond the participation that merely satisfies appearances – the commitment that leads to action. By choosing organisations that support new ways of working: beyond silos and verticality, ensuring complementarity and even benevolent tensions that generate innovation. By adopting, in the face of complexity, the humility of adaptive “leadership”, in tune with the diversity of our corporate groups, their stakes and their contexts.
Leave a Reply