Normalization of Deviance (2015)

“Let's say you notice that your company has a problem that I've heard people at most companies complain about: people get promoted for heroism and putting out fires, not for preventing fires.” My first day at work at big-laser-company. Manufacturing engineer for a laser (then) so complex, it required a PhD to solve problems to get units out the door. The product was a ring laser. What that means is that the laser beam travels around in a race track…

It's not just growth-oriented new companies. The old ACME BigCorp.'s have exactly the same problems, but not because they disregard best practices because everyone is fixated on growth, but because inertia has crept in everywhere. Because everything is executed top-down and there's no back-channel. Because people care about their yearly bonuses and would rather not bring up uncomfortable truth to their superiors. And most of all, because there are zero techies among managers. There's a complete mental disconnect…

How would you feel if: - you were a chef. you went to culinary school and know about cooking and best practices. - you are asked to forget everything you learned in school and flip burgers with overly reused oil and unwashed equipment. - you are told that there's no time to clean the kitchen, or wash your hands. just flip as many burgers as possible to maximize profit. - the ones that cook the most burgers are rewarded, treated…

"[...]someone recently explained to me how great it is that, instead of using data to make decisions, we use political connections, and that the idea of making decisions based on data is a myth anyway; no one does that." From my experience the second part is somewhat true. I have yet to see a "data driven" decision that wasn't actually driven by a very political process of choosing what data to gather and how to interpret the results. (This obviously…