We answer the question "when should we use HR disciplinary action/punishment?" with some stories and examples. From there, we look at how counterfactuals impact our post-event learning.

(Transcript Start)


[00:00:00] spk_0: This is Andy and this is Matt and you're listening to

[00:00:03] spk_1: the Hop podcast with no name.

[00:00:06] spk_0: What a dumb name. So stupid.

[00:00:23] spk_1: All right. Welcome back. We're into episode two on accountability. I feel like a newscaster. I can't figure out why. Ok. Um This is a normal introduction, Matt, you got this. So anyway, uh we, we are in episode two on accountability. Uh We had left off with some very clear homework. It wasn't, I mean, probably

[00:00:49] spk_0: the clearest homework I've ever given.

[00:00:52] spk_1: And it was, when do we feel people need to be punished in an organization or should

[00:01:00] spk_0: I say like any

[00:01:01] spk_1: time in general? No, when should people be punished in an organization? That's where we left off and I'm sticking to it. So we are going to go right into it. Uh And I think we'll start with a kind of a story.

[00:01:18] spk_0: We us, we

[00:01:19] spk_1: us a picture. Um I, I'll try to at least, which goes into a training you and I did

[00:01:27] spk_0: a couple of weeks ago, not too long ago,

[00:01:29] spk_1: not too long ago where we decided to do it a little bit differently because it was going to be centered around accountability for the whole, I think it was four hours. So we decided to start by asking the group a question or a couple of questions and they were uh pretty straightforward. It was what does accountability mean? Uh when to do we need to hold someone accountable? Uh And then lastly was, when do we feel pressure from above or from leaders in the organization to hold people accountable? That maybe is not a part of uh part two, which was when we want to do. It's when the leaders feel like we should, but we don't, we

[00:02:09] spk_0: don't do any anyway, we don't agree, but we don't agree. But

[00:02:13] spk_1: we know who uh sometimes can be the loudest voice in the room. That's where we left everyone. And do you remember what happened after that?

[00:02:21] spk_0: Yeah. So I remember that the conversation around like what accountability was and like when we felt like we needed to hold people accountable, it was very close to what we just talked about in the last episode, right? So people were very much aligned with this idea of, yeah, you know, holding someone accountable is not the same thing as accountability. And we have to look at ownership and that was the general theme of the discussion. And then I felt good. It felt great. And I was

[00:02:50] spk_1: like, wow, do we need to be here? I was like,

[00:02:52] spk_0: we got it, it. Um And then, and then we decided just to try to clarify, we just asked the question with different words. We said, ok, well, given all that, when do we need to punish people in the organization? So the same thing as the homework and people had lots of answers, I

[00:03:10] spk_1: couldn't tell someone like all of a sudden, like raised a pitch fork. I got it. I figured it out and they knew uh the moments, but we had some very clear and very passionate answers and, and, and I would say in general, a lot of people agreed like it, it wasn't like someone was a voice and everyone else was like, no, that's not true. What we saw was, there's a pretty consistent thought as to when we need to. Yes.

[00:03:34] spk_0: And so, so one of them is something that I think we would agree with in this hop space, right? So there is an idea of, hey, if somebody has really negative intent, like if they are intending harm, then we absolutely need to punish the person. And sometimes that's not even like punishment in the organization that's like calling external authorities to ask for this person to be removed. So, yeah, so that was one of the things that was mentioned

[00:03:59] spk_1: and, and just to be clear, we totally agree with that. There's not, there's not, there's not like it is in those situations,

[00:04:09] spk_0: if someone is intending harm for sure, we want to remove that person as quickly as possible. From

[00:04:15] spk_1: doing more harm and that's harm to others or harm to the organization or whatever you're saying, if your intention is to cause pain, then that can't be

[00:04:23] spk_0: tolerated. Correct. But then the other very, very loud narrative that we hear over and over again is um when somebody feels as though the person was willful in their action and they, we often call it willfully negligent. And that was a resounding theme in the room had a lot of

[00:04:49] spk_1: cheers, the people in general like,

[00:04:55] spk_0: like willful disregard for the rules or willful negligence. And so that's the place where it seems to get super murky, especially, right? Especially if we have Willful, what somebody would describe as willful disregard for the rules. And that rule happens to be something like a cardinal rule or a life saving rule. And then for most people that feels like pretty clear cut in terms of punishment shall be issued. Actually, most organizations even have policies around that, right? So like if there is willful disregard for a rule, that is a cardinal rule. Most organizations say there shall be this type of punishment for it

[00:05:40] spk_1: and it's not always a three strikes and you're out

[00:05:43] spk_0: a one strike, you're out with very few few questions

[00:05:47] spk_1: asked. And I, I think it's important to call out that in a lot of these conversations you can see, I don't know the emotion in people's eyes when they, when they tell us this because it means a lot to them like these, they're thinking of stories or examples that they've gone through when they're saying this, like they really, it's really passionate and, and as someone who's not from safety, sometimes they feel a bit disconnected, obviously, I can empathize with what they've gone through or what they may have gone through. But people are really passionate with this idea of like, we just can't tolerate that. You just

[00:06:19] spk_0: can't. Yeah. And, and I remember feeling that way, like, I mean, I personally felt that way when I first started to hear about these hop concepts, I was like, this is great except there's a line in the sand. And that line in the sand is when you have somebody willfully breaking a really, really important rule and we cannot have any tolerance for that because the rest of that statement then is that they're willfully breaking a rule that could either put them in serious danger or put the people around them in serious danger or put the organization in jeopardy one way or another. And that is not something we can tolerate. And then, right? And then I started to use these hop concepts in practice. And suddenly that like black and white narrative was no longer black and white because I can tell you that I have encountered many situations in which I mean, technically on paper, somebody violated a rule, like knew they were doing it right? It wasn't like it wasn't a surprise to them. Um And yet I would say that the proper response to that would not be to punish them and you're giving me the face, right? That everyone gives of like, like what are those situations? Like, what does that mean?

[00:07:33] spk_1: I don't want to say you're being vague, but I do want some examples but give me, I will not tolerate you being vague.

[00:07:43] spk_0: That's fair. Um Yeah. so the difficulty with just looking at the rule on the surface is that we don't understand what it means in context. And here's what I have learned through doing operational learning, through learning, learning teams through like real examples is that every single rule that we think we have nailed, like we really thoughtful about it made perfect sense when we wrote it. It seems as though like it should always be follow every single rule has exceptions and we often don't know what those exceptions are. I mean, I would, I'd even say like that extends to just like normal life. I

[00:08:30] spk_1: mean, you could probably make up some scenarios in uh in normal life where every rule,

[00:08:37] spk_0: I mean, I can't really think of a, a rule like even like the golden rule, what treat thy neighbor as thyself. I can't think of a rule that doesn't have some sort of contextual exception to. It could be very specific.

[00:08:58] spk_1: I, I would agree. I'm sure this has been tackled in a lot of movies and probably other

[00:09:06] spk_0: subplot to most things that we Yeah. Ok. So if, if that's true, then that means whatever rule we have in place, um, in real life, there are going to be exceptions to it or like it doesn't have operational fidelity, meaning it doesn't make sense. And the only chance that we have to address the problem is if we're able to learn about what the problem is and we can't do that. Well, if we think that punishing the person who can supply us with some of that information, if that's going to be the solution set to learning. And I'm gonna give like just a super specific real example um that just happened fairly recently because I would say like even talking about this every day, there are examples that come across the table or come across the computer screen to us. And I'm like, well, that's probably a person probably knew better like they and just kind of they're just being a little bit lazy and then I always remind myself there's more to the story. Um So one fairly recent example is that we are talking about the requirement for secondary verification for lockout tag out. And there was a scenario in which somebody was talking about a maintenance person who went to go actually flip the disconnect and was going to do work on a piece of equipment, picture a piece of equipment that's got a lot of moving parts and to do the maintenance work, your hands are where the parts would be moving and they found that this individual was not going to the control panel to actually verify that there wasn't power to the equipment, how

[00:10:43] spk_1: I'll speak for everyone. I

[00:10:46] spk_0: mean, it could save their hand. Right. Like, or their life in

[00:10:50] spk_1: that. That's what the gut instinct is. It's just, just go and check on. I mean, and it

[00:10:57] spk_0: wasn't very far away, right? Like it was within several paces of where the work needed to be done and it was like hit a button, verify check. So when you hear that on the surface, you're like, oh man, I mean, this, this person should know better. They've been doing like they're just being lazy like we need to set an example. If they're doing it, we're going to find other people are doing it. But if we set the example, then we're going to tell people this is not like this is not acceptable behavior.

[00:11:21] spk_1: If we tolerate this, now we're going to have next thing, you know, no one's, no one's verifying no one's locking out even. And we're just starting the cycle of Yeah,

[00:11:30] spk_0: bad. And honestly, that was my first thought right in hearing this example not very long ago. I said, well, all right.

[00:11:37] spk_1: OK, you can't see this but Andrew just crossed her arms, which I remember is the exact thing you did when you first heard this. So if you could just get out of your method acting and get back into the story, that'd be

[00:11:47] spk_0: great. Um And then luckily there's another voice that comes in the back of my mind. Now that said, well, if you think it's that simple, Andrea, you probably don't understand enough context. And so I started to ask questions and what I did not know is at the time that I was asking these questions, the people we were talking to there actually happened to be a maintenance person on the call and I did not know this. And so there was a person who could actually answer these questions. And so the questions that we started to ask were just operational learning questions of like, OK, so like when are we actually having to, you know, flip the disconnect, what type of maintenance work are we having to do? What does that look like? And in, I don't know ma under five minutes of conversation, I think we learned that somewhere between 70 80% of the maintenance work that has to be done on this equipment, there is no other way to do it except with the power on while the equipment is running, while all those cogs and wheels are physically moving and somebody has to have their hands very, very close to that. And so I started to think in context, right, is this secondary verification really that important compared to the fact that 70 to 80% of the time this person is doing work with the equipment running and live because there is no other way that they know how, that anyone knows how at this point to do that work. And I started to realize I could go down the punishment route, but that's actually not going to address the overall problem. And I also can contextually understand that the, uh, the, the step of doing secondary like verification, like it feels completely unnecessary. I'm actually even at this point surprised that they flip the disconnect at all considering most of most of the time they can't, you know, turn the power off to begin with. So I understand why somebody wouldn't do it. I don't have to like it. But I certainly the thing I like less is I like less the fact that 70 to 80% of the time, we can't even turn the power off at all. And if I'm gonna take my energy and effort to do something, it's not gonna be to punish the person who is subject to that. It's going to be to learn with them and understand the reality to make some improvements. And that,

[00:14:04] spk_1: I mean, there's a, there's a realistic possibility that we could be hearing that information and then if I knew how to use the device, I'd put the record scratch on it. You heard it?

[00:14:15] spk_0: Can you please just do it for us? No, no, no, with your mouth

[00:14:21] spk_1: I got it in one, where you hear it and then it's like, hey, I'm really sorry, but that's a lifesaving rule that you just violated. We can't have you on this job. If you don't take these rules seriously, you got to go and whether that's you gotta go today in the next couple of days or you just don't work here anymore. I mean, that very well could be the result of hearing that. And then what do we do? We just wait for the next person to make the same mistake and we don't change anything or learn any context, we just go, oh, you did that. Well, sorry.

[00:14:56] spk_0: That's it. And I think maybe an important piece of this puzzle for us is the, the recognition that like things like cardinal rules, the reason they exist is because it, it's the most brittle part of our system. Like already, it's the most brutal part of our system. So we have these really, really strong important rules because those rules are often the only thing keeping us alive in that circumstance. So unless we're willing to create an environment to be able to hear about when those rules don't feel logical or when they don't feel important or when um it, like they physically are not capable of being followed, then we have the most brittle part of our system even more brittle than we think it is. And if you have a logical adult, human who would be the ultimate price payer if something went wrong thinking that it doesn't make sense to follow or it's not reasonable to follow or there's other contextual reasons that make something else much, a bigger problem that it doesn't even seem important enough to follow. Then other logical adult humans are going to make a similar decision. So we have a brittle system that is even more brittle and we have to physically change something. We, we can't just decide that we're gonna punish this human and then wait for somebody else to do the same thing,

[00:16:16] spk_1: even if it helps us sleep at night.

[00:16:19] spk_0: And I guess that's the hard part. Right? Because it's more, I don't know, I don't know if emotionally satisfying is the right words, but it's, it feels as though we've taken drastic action when we do resort to punishment, but we haven't actually fixed anything.

[00:16:33] spk_1: Well, if we, if we put these, you know, these life saving rules, these cardin rules on the pedestal of being untouchable, they're, you know, when, when someone breaks them, it's just so easy to say, well, it's a person problem. And so I know what to do with person problems. Here's the door, right?

[00:16:52] spk_0: Remove the human. But realistically what we end up creating is actually just an environment where people are not willing to talk about the exceptions. And I remember I was doing some operational learning around the use of um uh it was a, a certain type of P pe that needed to be used for live electrical work. And you're always supposed to wear these gloves. Like the cardinal rule is you keep these gloves on at all times. Um, but through experience, I've learned that once again, there's an exception to every rule and sometimes the work that we're asked to do with the P pe that we are asked to use is either not easy to do or sometimes darn near impossible to do. And so, um I was working with an organization that this rule had been enforced through punishment many, many times. And so even in a learning environment where we're asking, hey, are there any exceptions to being able to use these gloves? People would just say no, no, absolutely not. We use them all the time, we use them all the time, which I thought was strange because I haven't experienced that being possible before. Like I've not experienced something that's like this mandated thou shalt and it always is possible in every single situation.

[00:18:00] spk_1: Everyone's like, wow, they really got it with this one. I never want to take

[00:18:04] spk_0: off. And so I actually just took a break during the learning team. And um, there were about five or six people in the learning team and three of them during break came up and privately spoke to me about some of the exceptions to when they had to take off their gloves, which those exceptions have existed for a very long time and because people were not willing to talk about them, then we weren't able to address them. So that's the price that we pay when we think that punishment is the right way to go. Because we believe we're solving a problem that feels on the surface like a person problem. And realistically, we're just taking what we would call operational struggles and hiding them and not able to address the reasons behind why that behavior makes sense in that moment. And

[00:18:51] spk_1: I'm gonna give you 30 seconds. But if you can just connect that back to what it does to accountability,

[00:18:59] spk_0: what happens? Yeah, I, I mean, I think we mentioned this on the last episode that like when we, when we mix those things up, we end up actually reducing that environment of accountability, right? People just start to feel like a cog in a wheel. They don't feel like they can take ownership of things. Actually, the idea that you can be responsible for your actions and account for meaning to tell the story of your actions. That's that definition of true accountability. We actually remove the ability for people to account for meaning to tell the story of their actions because they know that if they do independent of the context of it, they might lose their job.

[00:19:33] spk_1: You got it in 30 seconds, which I didn't know what I was going to do. If you didn't, I probably would have just like turn your microphone off. But uh I think if I'm, if I'm thinking about this objectively, it just sounds like what we're saying is you don't, you don't punish in hot, you don't punish an hop. I mean, and it's, that's just not true. Even if we're giving examples why you wouldn't punish when maybe these cardinal rules are broken. But there, there, there is times when you need to punish

[00:20:03] spk_0: someone. Yes. And, and there are things like um drug use. There are things like uh bullying, there are things like horse play. Um There are things like, you know, if, if we have an environment where a bunch of people are physically uncomfortable, working around this person because they don't seem to be able to listen to anyone's instruction. Those are times where we do have a person problem and once again, write the test for that, you remove that person, the problem goes away. If you removed any of the people, like if you took that maintenance person and removed them from doing that maintenance, work on that piece of equipment, you should not be surprised. We should not be surprised if we find other people thinking that secondary verification. It's not really all that important because guess what? I have to have my hands on this thing when it's moving all the time anyway. So that would not be a surprise. That's a system problem

[00:20:52] spk_1: and, and horseplay. Yeah, we, we, we talk about this. It's not, uh, you know, people sitting around a lunch table doing the bottle flip, seeing who can land a water bottle

[00:21:01] spk_0: on. It's not like, just having fun. No, no fun in the workplace ever again.

[00:21:06] spk_1: It's, if we're in a high risk environment and you just decide now is the time that I could joly push someone that's, that's unacceptable

[00:21:13] spk_0: horseplay. Like, if they're wearing, like, fall protection on top, just like, please don't do that or like uh doing donuts on a forklift with somebody on the fork, like stuff like that. Yeah.

[00:21:22] spk_1: Yeah, that's maybe that unacceptable. Yeah. Uh OK. So we, we do like to try to give something tangible. So what can someone go and do?

[00:21:33] spk_0: So homework? Is this what you mean or are we calling it the completely optional thing that it's like

[00:21:40] spk_1: a choose your own adventure, but it's, we're kind of telling you what to

[00:21:43] spk_0: choose. Ok. So I think eventually we would love to get to a place where um post event. We don't really even need to look at the idea of punishment as something we should do. But as we mentioned in the last podcast, that's like a dramatic departure from the norm today, maybe someday. But so uh a baby step in that direction would be to at least take a look at the events that we are using punishment for now and to be able to make some assessments about them. So the homework should we choose to accept? It would be to take a look at like um I don't know, a quality event or a safety event that you dear listener deem punishment was the right course of action. And then take a look at the narrative that was crafted about that event. And what we're looking for is we're trying to see whether or not um the event could be described without counterfactual. So, counterfactual are things like um saying the person should have uh the person failed to, the person was supposed to, but didn't if that's the way that we're describing an event, really, what that means is we're actually describing what we wished had happened, not what actually did happen, which is kind of usually a pretty clear indication that we don't have enough contextual information to understand local rationale meaning. We're, we're still using hindsight bias to make the decisions. And usually, if we're using hindsight bias, we've decided we have a person problem, especially if something like a cardinal rule was broken. So take a look, if we have to use counterfactual, then we might want to go learn about that process again, because the act of removing that human probably didn't address the underlying problems. And in the rare circumstance that you actually do find that you could describe contextually what happened without using counterfactual. And you still believe that disciplinary action was the right thing to do. Then perhaps that is the intersection between uh the person problem and an event which is super rare, but it's not to say it's not existent, which

[00:24:00] spk_1: we would then ask. Please share if you find the class. Yeah. So you can share it with us directly at hot podcast dot com. Let us know what you found, what you identified, what you're thinking, what you're stuck with. Uh And we can share it. We will anonymize it. So we're not sharing any names or companies, but we would love to hear it if you have some special circumstances or one offs or anything like that

[00:24:26] spk_0: sounds good.

[00:24:27] spk_1: All right. One more episode of Accountability, I think to come. Yes.

[00:24:31] spk_0: Yeah, we definitely want to talk about a few things. I think we probably want to touch on the idea of a culpability matrix and we probably want to talk about how do you actually create an environment of high accountability? Yeah. So that's next

[00:24:44] spk_1: time. All right. Thanks for joining. We'll uh we'll talk soon.

[00:24:54] spk_0: Well, that's it. Yeah.

[00:24:57] spk_1: Another one in the books. We did it.

[00:25:01] spk_0: If you uh want to send us any of your thoughts, actually fling us any of your thoughts you can do. So at the website www dot hop podcast dot com.

[00:25:13] spk_1: That's Hoppo DC A ST dot com. That's still

[00:25:20] spk_0: such a stupid name.

[00:25:21] spk_1: We look forward to hearing from you. Thanks for listening.