The ten year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was on April 20th. As such, the Mark Wahlberg movie about the disaster was on TV. I'm not a big movie guy but this one fascinates me. I think this is true for several reasons. First is the drilling is a dangerous work environment like our jobsites are. We make observations, quick analyses and decisions regularly like the Deepwater Horizon crew did. Second, my dad is a petroleum geologist. I went to a few land based rigs growing up and I have some oil and gas knowledge from being around my dad growing up. Third is that my brother was a commercial sailor (turned attorney, turned maritime academy professor). Some of his classmates and guys I have hung out with before are dynamic positioning officers doing similar work to what was shown in the movie. In general drilling is a risky operation like construction where challenging and complicated decisions are made every day. Safety is the priority but jobs often accept certain risks as a part of doing business. It's been proven many times over that actual safety incidents cost more than preventing them so making decisions that are safe are almost always the more profitable, even if they add cost and time to the schedule.
The incidents and observations that lead up to the actual disaster were eye catching to me. We are taught in construction that no incident is (should be) acceptable even if it was a near miss or a minor accident. Maintenance is also key. Numerous little issues can be an indicator that something isn't right and that it is only a matter of time until a big one occurs. It seemed that the Deepwater Horizon had several of these issues and didn't quite get them under control. This is why knowing our safety numbers are important. Numbers on our job can be indicators of bad culture and that a big one is just around the corner.
What really caught my attention is that SOP's of the drill operation and the wisdom of the crew noted or indicated that things weren't right. Even still people made decisions to overlook warning signs and keep working.
I tend to end up down the Google rabbit hole at least once a day which is what happened when I researched what caused the catastrophe and what the aftermath was years down the road. I came across several interesting articles but one by Popular Mechanics caught my attention when it discussed normalization of deviance.
This term was developed by Diane Vaughn who was researching what went wrong when the Challenger Shuttle blew up after lift off in 1986. Vaugh developed this term to explain how things that are unsafe become acceptable procedure. For the Challenger disaster this had to do temperature at launch and how this impacted O-rings. Observation of launch and inspection determined that hot gas blow by had gotten by the first o-ring and had damaged the second o-ring. Both the blow by and the damaged o-ring were deemed acceptable and no system or equipment changes were made. Cold temperatures on the day of the launch made things worse which several people were aware of. The launch still happened and catastrophe occurred.
During her investigation, Diane Vaughn found that the issue was widely observed but because nothing bad had happened during prior launches the team got comfortable working at the outer edges of tolerance which left no room for error. Based on this finding, the developed the concept of normalization of deviance. Essentially, people get comfortable with working at the out limits of risk that will not cause an issue which can result in an incident because there is no room for error.
How does this apply in construction? If we aren't careful, construction can have numerous "o-ring" issues that seem small but end up causing a huge issue later on. Safety is one category in construction where normalization of deviance can lead to incomplete conformance with safety SOP's and incidents. A common issue is lack of PPE. The benefits aren't always obvious and crews can get away with not wearing stuff all the time. As a result you have the guys that wear glasses on their hard hats most of the day. Productivity issues can also be caused by normalization of deviance. Productivity might lag when starting a new task or at difficult work locations. If project leaders aren't careful, this can lead to consistently bad productivity and profit erosion over the life of a project.
How do we avoid normalization of deviance? The short answer is develop plans and standards and work them exactly as designed. Cheating or accepting poor results here and there can result in a culture of being blissfully unaware of all risks and making bad decisions. Success and failure are both habits. The more we are disciplined with the small things and details, the more the big things will fall into place where we want them. To a certain extent, how we do anything is how we do everything. There's a good book and quote by Jocko Willink in which he states discipline equals freedom. Being disciplined enough to work the plan and not accept nonconformance takes stress off us and makes big goals doable. If we are disciplined in doing the little things right, we can do great things and build a better world.
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