Читать книгу Reframing Organizations - Lee G. Bolman - Страница 49

Rules, policies, standards, and standard operating procedures are developed to ensure that individual behavior is predictable and consistent. Rules and policies govern conditions of work and specify standard ways of completing tasks, handling personnel issues, and relating to customers and others. The goal is to ensure the handling of similar situations in comparable ways and to avoid “particularism” (Perrow, 1986)—responding to specific issues based on personal whims or political pressures. Two citizens' complaints about a tax bill are supposed to be treated similarly, even if one citizen is a prominent politician and the other a shoe clerk. The response to two residents requesting garbage pickup or a street repair should follow the same procedures regardless of economic status or race. Once a situation is defined as fitting a particular rule, the course of action is clear, straightforward and, in an ideal world, almost automatic.

A standard is a benchmark to ensure that goods and services maintain a specified level of quality. Measurement against the standard makes it possible to identify and fix problems. During the 1970s and 1980s, American manufacturing standards lagged, while Japanese manufacturers were scrupulous in ensuring that high standards were widely known and universally accepted. In one case, an American company ordered ball bearings from a Japanese plant. The Americans insisted on what they saw as a daunting standard—no more than 20 defective parts per thousand. The order arrived with a separate bag of 20 defective bearings and a tongue‐in‐cheek note: “We were not sure why you wanted these, but here they are.” More recently, pressure for world‐class quality has spawned growing interest in “Six Sigma,” a statistical standard of near perfection (Pyzdek, 2003). Although Six Sigma has raised quality standards in many companies around the world, its laser focus on measurable aspects of work processes and outcomes has sometimes smothered creativity in innovative companies such as 3M (Hindo, 2007, pp. 8–12). Safe and measurable may crowd out the elusive breakthroughs a firm needs.

Standard operating procedures (SOPs) reduce variance in routine tasks that have little margin for error. Commercial airline pilots typically fly with a different crew every month. Cockpit actions are tightly intertwined, the need for coordination is high, and mistakes can kill. SOPs consequently govern much of the work of flying a plane. Pilots are trained extensively in the procedures and seldom violate them. But a significant percentage of aviation accidents occur in the rare case in which someone does. More than one airplane has crashed on takeoff after the crew missed a required checklist item.

SOPs can fall short, however, in the face of “black swans” (Taleb, 2007)—freak surprises that the SOPs were never designed to handle. In the 9/11 terrorist attacks, pilots followed standard procedures for dealing with hijackers: cooperate with their demands and try to get the plane on the ground quickly. These SOPs were based on a long history of hijackers who wanted to make a statement, not wreak destruction on a suicide mission. Passengers on United Airlines Flight 93, who had learned via cell phones that hijackers were using aircraft as bombs rather than bully pulpits, abandoned this approach. They lost their lives fighting to regain control of the plane, but theirs was the only one of four hijacked jets that failed to devastate a high‐profile building.