The Irrational Organization

Psychology 101

Implicit within all discussions about Human Factors, human variability and behavioural risk is a recognition that psychological factors play a more significant role in the workplace than many of us like to think.26 Dr Mannie Sher, Principal Consultant at the Tavistock Institute, explains:

‘Many organisations promote the notion that they are fundamentally professional, rational and serious, doing things for all the right reasons and any decisions that are less rational are the exception rather than the rule. I understand why it's reassuring to have this view. But if you spend time in an organisation and step back, you realise that less rational behaviour is more common than you think.

So, I start with the position that organisations, as with many social structures, want to appear to be rational when, in fact, they are not fully rational. There are individual personalities of many types, from extroverts to introverts, from ambitious people to less ambitious people, those with big egos and thin skin, etc. And beyond this, there are better and less good working relationships, friendships, networks, rivalries, empires, silos, etc.

In other words, every organisation has a range of deep, underlying, irrational forces influencing them; whether it's in their behaviour, decision‐making, implementation, relationships, etc. And until we have a better understanding of the irrational factors that are in play at work, whether at the individual level, in an operational team, a senior committee or at the board level or even in a strategic body that regulates others, you are always going to get dysfunctions and surprises, based on the mysteries of organisational and inter‐organisational behaviour’.27

The challenging thought is that we cannot fight, conquer or overcome ‘the human factor’. It's baked into who we are. Following policies and procedures, receiving training on cognitive biases or using checklists does not mean you will overcome those biases.28 Most pervasive of all, in my experience, are ‘self‐justification’ and ‘confirmation bias’, and the role of ‘obedience to authority’. These mean, among other things, that ‘self‐assessment’‐based mechanisms to report problems may not work.

Trying to eliminate human factors by using automated processes, or Artificial Intelligence, may help, but there are still people and organisations ‘behind the scenes’ who fund, design and oversee these activities.29

RCA and systems thinking tell us that we must accept that people have their fingerprints on what appear to be even the ‘cleanest’ environments. Amilcar Zambrano illustrates what he sees:

‘I come across people who are highly skilled from a technical perspective; they love machinery and equipment, circuit boards and all of the engineering know‐how you would expect them to have given their role. And their bosses are often quite similar; they are technical, practical “no nonsense” people. The culture is highly professional and process and data oriented.

However, on more than one occasion, I've noticed that if something goes wrong involving an engineer and even their supervisor, you can see sometimes it's because of people thinking too much “inside the box”. You'll discover something has or hasn't been done because of what it says in a procedural document, but without those involved thinking about, or checking, the context in which that procedure was envisaged or how it might fit in with the bigger picture.

You can say all you want about “they ought to have realised there might be a wider question to consider”, but these people are good at their jobs 99% of the time precisely because they like detail, can stay focused and don't get distracted. But sometimes “out of the box” thinking is needed and may be important to see a problem at the fringes.

In any event, sometimes engineers face challenges requiring decisions to be made at short notice to keep a piece of equipment working. They do their best but may, unknowingly, be storing up a problem for some time down the line.’

Amilcar’s observations also raise questions about how qualifications, experience, and habits of thought affect organisational decisions. A method that works for a familiar technical task may miss a problem involving wider interactions.30