It's 1841, the 5th of October. A train is flying at full speed from Worcester, Massachusetts to Albany, New York.
You are the conductor.
You are happily singing because you are on schedule and everything is fine.
Your happiness, however, is about to morph into terror.
You see a light in front of you where you would never expect it to be.
It's the headlight of a train that is about to crash frontally against yours.
You brake hard, but it's too late.
You die and with you a passenger. Other 17 passengers get injured.
Yet your sacrifice is not in vain.
Western Railroad, the company operating the train, asks an engineer, George W. Whistler, to find a solution.
The train-wreck organization is born. It's how most activities are now organized in the Western world.
Train-wreck may sound disparaging, but, when this management style was invented, it seemed to be an improvement.
It brought order to chaotic aggregations of people nobody knew what they were doing.
It made it easy to assign blame when things went wrong.
It rests on two fundamental assumptions:
Let's focus on the second assumption, that blame is the solution to our headaches.
Accountability is the name we give to the management intervention that consists of punishing the worker who makes a mistake.
It's the only way the train-wreck management knows to fix problems.
It's the monster.
It took more than a century to reconsider the assumptions our way to organise work is based on.
An engineer discovered flaws in them and helped Japanese companies to improve the quality of their products taking advantage of the new way to design organizations he envisaged.
His name was Edward Deming.
More than half a century later, most businesses still organise work in the same flawed way Deming discovered to be inadequate.
Maybe we are doing it out of habit. We built our educational system on that model. It soaks our organisations to the point that we can't imagine anything different.
It's a model that gives managers a feeling of control. Who doesn't want to feel they are making things happen?
It takes time to understand Deming's ideas. No wonder they are difficult to implement in a world starving for time.
Do you remember that you are the unlucky conductor of the train that crashed in 1841?
If the train-wreck organisation had been introduced earlier, would it have saved your life?
Who knows? We should perform a deep investigation of the causes of the disaster to discover what would have prevented the crash.
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(full article: How can you protect yourself from the accountability monster?)