The slippery slope to mediocrity is a fate awaiting far too many organizations that have enjoyed success. Success can leave any organization vulnerable to a host of debilitating culture villains; previously unacceptable attitudes and behaviors that mysteriously become… acceptable:
- “We’re making barrels of money, why change now?”
- “Don’t worry, that’s ‘good enough.’”
- “Hmmm, nothing bad happened. Guess we no longer need be concerned about following that operating procedure.”
- “Oh, our customers (or clients, patients, employees) will never notice.”
- “Don’t sweat the small stuff.”
The names used to describe the culture villains driving the dysfunction are as varied as the organizations, yet some iteration of the following three inevitably play a role:
- Indifference: The state of not caring.
- Fear: How to maintain the status quo (without upsetting the founding family, the stock market, the powers that be)?
- Rationalization: The practice of obfuscating the truth via guile and situationally crafted (and flawed) logic.
A fourth culture villain is the one introduced in the title of this blog, Normalization of Deviance. And, it’s arguably more onerous in that it contains elements of all aforementioned culture villains.
I was reminded of this despicable culture villain during a recent tour of NASA’s Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Despite the intriguing back-stage tours covering the history of our space program and learning of ongoing efforts to eventually send humans to Mars, my mind kept drifting to the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster of January 28, 1986.
Years earlier, I read Diane Vaughn’s masterful analysis of this tragedy in her 1996 book: The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, And Deviance At NASA.
Vaughn deftly explained how the scourge of Normalization of Deviance (she coined this phrase) could infect any organization… even one as stellar and respected as NASA.
As Vaughn describes it, Normalization of Deviance is not due to rules being blatantly violated or outright misconduct by individuals. Rather, it’s a slow-growing cancer (my words) driven by budgetary pressures, unattainable performance expectations, and pride. Ultimately NASA, in its drive to perform, developed a culture that was “comfortable with flaws”; standard operating procedures were relaxed when “nothing bad happened.”
Vaughn’s assertion in 1996 of how NASA’s culture of relaxed standards could lead to future problems proved prescient 17 years later, when Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated upon reentry to Earth on February 1, 2003.
I highly recommend reading her updated, 2016 version of The Challenger Launch Decision.
In the meantime, take a few moments to assess the health of your organization. Specifically, can you identify which culture villains have begun seeping into your daily operations? If so, what have you done to banish those villains? If not, why?
Sadly, the slippery slope to mediocrity is created by leaders who feed and nurture culture villains. Conversely, leaders who avoid mediocrity and crush culture villains champion the following quote I learned while consulting for Andy Grove, CEO of Intel Corporation:
“Success breeds arrogance. Arrogance breeds complacency. Only the paranoid survive.”
Which type of leader are you?