We bought Boeing stock some years back. It seemed reasonable: there are only two companies that make big planes, and they seemed evenly matched—Boeing was one of them. Boeing had a solid history; the industry looked stable, what with air travel having a bright future.
While I don’t think that it was our purchase of a small piece of the company that caused the proverbial “tilt!,” Boeing at some point started encountering troubles. It hasn’t just been the major disasters, which I will not recount here. It is also the relentless screw-ups.
It’s one thing to encounter an instance of wildly unusual circumstances that come together to create a catastrophe. It is quite another to make mistakes that could have been avoided, that become public, that cause at least annoyance (a panel missing from the underside of one of their planes), or terror (a door falling off during flight). This is compounded when there are simple explanations for the error. It isn’t technology, it is a failure in basic manufacturing processes. It’s people.
As I’ve managed teams, one of my basic principles is that just because you’ve completed a task, and nobody has complained, you shouldn’t assume you did everything correctly. You may have made a mistake, but it simply hasn’t been discovered yet. Maybe it never will. Whatever the task, if you care about it, it is worth the time to continually review your work, even if there are no complaints. Don’t waste your time, but look at it, talk about it, and accept change if it is needed. Improve.
That’s what Boeing hasn’t done, and that’s why they are on the front page again, and again, with rather minor errors that are a big deal. Because they are public. Because they relate to something the company is supposed to do: build safe planes.
When I was just starting out as an attorney, I didn’t have a lot of assignments. Even so, there were one or two that I feared. They involved some procedure, or some area of law, with which I was completely unfamiliar. I avoided these files, even though I knew that the potential for a bad outcome increased with every day of inattention. I later recognized that these were the “ticking” files: I could hear them, and I promised myself I would handle it—tomorrow. Classic procrastination.
Bad things happen to good people, and to bad people, and to some people where good/bad is irrelevant—they simply didn’t get the job done. In looking back, there are often lamentations of “I could have,” and “I should have” done something different, something better. Let’s call it the “Coulda Shoulda Syndrome.” Procrastination is one cause. Incompetence is another.
In my experience most such failures, though, are not pernicious at all. A person, or a company or an agency, simply gets comfortable, and accepts its own performance as satisfactory. Only later, when the crisis arrives, and the investigation reveals the problem, does the syndrome go into operation.
A good example of a problem in this country that I thought we had solved was race. I know there have been individual instances of discrimination and epithets, but I thought we had identified the problem long ago and, well, fixed it. Sure, there are occasional lapses, but overall we’re doing pretty well.
As a history major, I enjoy learning the background of a situation, to better understand the present. For example, I read Destiny Disrupted by Tamim Ansary. Mr. Ansary presented a history of the world through Islamic eyes. I read The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson. She recounted the migration of Black Americans out of the Jim Crow south and into the north and west. This migration of six million or so from 1915 to 1970 changed the face of America. I am reading Caste, again by Ms. Wilkerson, in which she points to India, Nazi Germany, and America (us!) as employing social systems that consigned certain of the population (in our case Blacks) to a subservient place in our society.
Racial discrimination. Redlining. Poll taxes. Separate drinking fountains.
One might think that we had dealt with this and fixed it. (Okay, except for a few cops in a few isolated departments.) That we had identified the situation, taken steps to eliminate its causes, and followed up to make sure we didn’t get so comfortable that we failed to recognize a continuing problem. That is what I expected of Boeing. It’s what my clients expected of me as their attorney. It’s what a lot of Americans expected of America.
For many years, agencies and companies conducted training, especially for managers, that emphasized process as a way to avoid liability for racial discrimination in the workplace. Hiring and promotion practices were carefully defined and scrutinized; avenues for complaints of improper behavior were posted prominently in the shop; and the commitment of the agency or company to compliance with the law was made known.
More recently, many agencies and companies have developed programs that seek to change not just processes, but hearts and minds. In this approach, simply avoiding overt (or even implicit) discrimination in the workplace isn’t enough—we must have a discussion about how we view others, adopt fair practices of the heart, with the belief that positive changes in the agency, in the company, will follow.
There is significant opposition to this new approach. You can make up your own mind as to how much of that emanates from racial animus. It occurs to me, however, that I thought we were done with all of that. We aren’t affected by the Coulda Shoulda Syndrome—we saw this coming and we fixed it. You know, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (60 years ago), Martin Luther King, Jr., Cesar Chavez.
Not. But you knew that. The history and practice of segregation haunts us still.
Our educational system, that reflects so many of the beliefs and practices of our society, provides evidence, if we needed it, that diversity has positive value in addressing past practices:
The same strategy that combats racial intolerance among K-12 students also produces schools where children are less likely to be bullied or feel alone, research has shown.
The secret lies in immersing students in racially and ethnically diverse groups during classroom and extracurricular activities, offering them daily opportunities to learn about and grow to understand each other, said UC Davis researcher Adrienne Nishina.
“Having cross-race and cross-ethnic friends may … make students of all racial or ethnic backgrounds feel like they belong at their school,” Nishina said. “We know that having a strong sense of belonging is related to a whole host of positive outcomes beyond positive attitudes towards school — such as better mental health and well-being.”
These principles are not, of course, restricted to the classroom. Little people grow up to be adults, and they do not shed their experiences, beliefs, and values as they graduate. They take them with them to the home, and to the workplace.
Ms. Nishina is pointing to diversity, and its beneficial effects, and I agree. Achieving diversity, and understanding, though, not only seems ephemeral, but to many it probably seems unnecessary. Do we still have a problem?
As Ms. Wilkerson points out in Caste, your position on the social ladder affects your perspective: where you stand depends on where you sit. For those at the top of the heap the ladder seems both secure and fair. We are all familiar with the fellow born on third base who thinks he hit a triple.
We are, however, surrounded by information, by facts, that support the view that vestiges of slavery and racial segregation have not been removed, and that serious issues remain. A UC researcher can report on her findings as they relate to the educational system, but the effort must be comprehensive. It involves all of us.
Over the years I’ve occasionally read about a new CEO that was brought in to turn a company around. From the lofty heights of their office, they would somehow transform sloth to diligence, cynicism to enthusiasm. I’ve often wondered how you do that. Elon Musk certainly changes things, but the picture presented by Walter Isaacson is someone who simply bulldozes his way to certain achievements, leaving the china shop in ruin.
The challenge: how do you change the behavior of the people on the shop floor? Change: from doing their part and then signing off, to actually caring about the final product? Change: from sitting silently and listening to a boss drone on and on, to speaking up and raising important concerns?
I don’t know how a CEO would change the culture of an agency or company. But perhaps that is simply a misguided perception. Perhaps a change in culture begins not at the so-called top, but at the so-called bottom. Perhaps Ms. Wilkerson is on the right track: Americans have participated in the establishment of a caste system, and we are the ones that must demolish it, and replace it with something better.
I think it is beyond peradventure that White people have held the power in this country during most of its history. I don’t think I need to cite evidence, though particular instances (Native Americans), government policies (Manifest Destiny), and social systems (Jim Crow) come to mind. The question is: should this change?
The answer, at least in our public utterances, is yes. In fact, many of us believe the change has already occurred---that we are living in a society that is basically fair. All of that bad stuff is history.
We all think that the Boeing engineers should build planes that don’t fall apart. We all think that our attorney should pay attention to our file, and if they must learn something, then do it and finish the job.
And that is, in essence, what we face today in America. We haven’t completed the work of building the society we say we want. We shouldn’t wait to experience the Coulda Shoulda Syndrome: we should take responsibility for changing our own little part of the world. That might be as important, and as simple, as changing our personal perspective.
That is what will make a real change in our culture.