Rail smashes offer system insights
After two serious railway crashes in Australia, it is worth reflecting that the conventional hierarchical structure of an organisation is said to have been introduced to industry from a military model because of a train smash.
Unfortunately, the motivation appears to have been the ability to apportion blame, rather than to create a safe and functional system.
In 1840, a railway accident in Massachusetts was investigated by an army major named Whistler. Inspired by the organisational chart of the Prussian Army, Whistler recommended that the railway company adopt a formal hierarchical structure, which it duly did.
US-based management expert Peter Scholtes, who visited Australia in the mid-1990s, believes this was the first time “managers” –mid-ranking employees whose whole job was to supervise the work of other employees were employed.
According to Scholtes, who quoted Whistler’s report on the accident at a Melbourne presentation, the job specifications for each employee were precisely detailed “so when the next accident occurs we will know who was derelict in his duty”.
But quality management pioneer Dr W Edwards Deming offered a new model for organisations in the mid-20th century after watching and assisting in the post-war reconstruction of Japan.
Admittedly not attempting anything as prescriptive as an organisational chart, Deming’s systems model is a fluid series of arrows representing the diverse activities of suppliers, production employees, researchers and others in a wide range of interactions.
This contrasts sharply with the rigid “family tree” organisational chart.
Peter Scholtes, who was a colleague of Deming’s, believes there is still too much emphasis on the role of the individual and too little understanding of systems in organisations.
“Too often we get simplistic responses to complex problems. And most of the time, our simplistic responses have to do with our well-trained instincts to find something more to do with our people,” he said at the 10th National Quality Management Conference.
“The best efforts in a dysfunctional system won’t work. What we should be doing is to create a system that works so well, it will succeed with the ordinary efforts of ordinary people – because all we’ve got is ordinary people.”
The ability to discern between common and special causes of variation is a vital management skill, according to Deming, Scholtes and others in the quality management school. One of the most common management fallacies is to assign special causes to what is actually normal variation in a process.
Scholtes said: “You’re likely to attribute to individual people credit for good things over which they didn’t have any control and blame for bad things over which they didn’t have any control.”