HRO 14: Questioning Attitude Part 2
Introduction
This is the second of my two-part discussion of questioning attitude, a key value in High Reliability Organizing. The references for both posts are at the end of the first post.
Recall that questioning attitude means accepting nothing at face value. It requires verifying everything you see on instrumentation and your surroundings, hear from others and the environment, and where you are in a procedure and where you are going next. The verification should be done independently whenever possible.
In the first post, I referenced research that suggests that questioning attitude improves divergent thinking on teams, proposed that it enhances the ability to “listen” to weak signals of danger, and noted that questioning attitude has much in common with Weick’s seven traits of sensemaking.
In certain communities of the U.S. Navy, operators are expected to practice questioning attitude by speaking up or challenging others, including superiors, when things don’t “look right” or they don’t understand something. Things not understood can be a course of action, a choice of procedure, diagnosis of a problem, a record in a log, or alignment between action taken and indications of instrumentation. Questioning attitude is both a skill and a decision.
Questioning attitude can be practiced during all aspects of operations, maintenance, inspections, record review, planning, or training. The technical foundation of a questioning attitude is deep knowledge of the fundamental principles of a system’s design and operation. The social skill of articulating concerns that come from questioning operations is just as important as the technical basis for one’s questions.
A Skill and a Decision
An effective questioning attitude is both a skill and a decision (DiGeronimo & Koonce, 2016, p. 114). It is a skill because questioning what is going on is most effective when it is done with a technical basis or data. An operator has to have specialized knowledge to know what data is relevant to their assessment of the situation. As a skill, it can only be improved with practice.
Questioning attitude is a decision to take a particular perspective on the world: nothing is as it seems. Following up on reports, checking data, and looking for problems behind signs that everything looks okay requires conscious effort not to gloss over anomalies and weak signals of problems. It also takes an effort to speak up.
The perspective of a questioning attitude results from deliberately asking the question, “How can I have confidence in what I am seeing, hearing, and having reported to me?” It is based on thought processes that apply fundamental system knowledge to interpreting the environment. It is also a skill that doesn’t come easily.
Speaking up, dissenting, and questioning when everyone else agrees on a decision is a challenge. Voicing a dissenting opinion isn’t easy because of strong, often unconscious, social pressures to conform to the majority view (Asch, 1956; Janus, 1972). People don’t like to “stick out” even in low stakes situations. The pressure is even worse when the stakes are high. People fear being in the minority. They face the very real risk of reprisal and rejection. Most of the time, they aren’t even conscious of being concerned or influenced by this (Nemeth, 2018).
The difficulty people have expressing questions is why speaking up must be an organizational value. This goes far beyond platitudes like “We want people to have a questioning attitude.” It must be made real to people through frequent training, modeling, and reinforcement. In their book “Extreme Operational Excellence,” DiGeronimo & Koonce gave an example of a technical problem on a submarine that wasn’t managed well. Based on a post-event critique, senior leaders realized that managers responsible for addressing the problem did not practice questioning attitude effectively. The ship’s leaders used the incident as a case study to teach the managers involved (they did the training) and the crew how to use more rigorous approaches to problem solving (DiGeronimo & Koonce, 2016, pp.116-118).
The skill of questioning attitude is developed through intentional, thoughtful effort honed through practice to overcome confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is the tendency we have to see what we want to see and ignore what doesn’t fit. Questioning attitude deliberately seeks disconfirming evidence.
Operationalizing Questioning Attitude
Questioning attitude is operationalized through behavior backed up by ways of thinking about work. This presents several issues for practice.
First, it cannot be proceduralized because conformity is largely unconscious. A questioning attitude is not part of the procedure, it is the way the procedure is enacted. It orients operators toward thinking and anticipating.
Employing a questioning attitude while following procedures means operators won’t blindly follow them. At each step, they think about the impact of the step for the actual situation, whether it’s safe to proceed given everything else that is going on, and the outcome to expect from following the step. Questioning attitude is not a step in a procedure, but rather the way operators think about and execute each step.
Second, questioning attitude is a motivator for additional actions under uncertainty. Under conditions of uncertainty, people have a tendency to overestimate their abilities and underweight risks (Skala, 2008). “Overconfidence replaces lack of information by overestimating ability” (Salamouris, 2013). Discounting the possible consequences of actions under uncertainty can lead to disaster in high-risk work (Dörner, 1996). People have a tendency to overvalue their experience and act precipitously based on incomplete information. Placing a high cultural value on questioning attitude encourages dissent and the consideration of additional possibilities.
Third, operators need to be sufficiently trained in how a procedure is executed and who does what, to understand how the actions of each member of the team contribute to success. They also have to recognize the results of successfully performing those actions. Leaders can improve safety by clearly stating their preference at the outset for alerting the team when someone is making or has made a mistake, including the leader. Mistakes can include operating a component the wrong way, using the wrong procedure, skipping steps in a procedure, or failing to verify initial conditions for a procedure.
Fourth, operating with a questioning attitude means being skeptical about all facets of system performance and never to “expect” things are operating correctly. Rather, operators are trained to “question” system performance constantly and confirm operation within normal bounds. This is done to operationalize the presumption that things might not be as they seem and proper operation must be verified through observing instrumentation, sounds, alarms, warning lights, and other indications.
Fifth, questioning attitude builds on a skeptical perspective by encouraging operators to apply their technical knowledge and experience to consider “what could go wrong,” how to detect it, and establish plans in advance for stabilizing systems. This can be considered for individuals or groups of operators performing a process. Leaders can stimulate this form of questioning attitude by quizzing individual watchstanders or posing problems to a group of operators. This can be done on and off watch.
Finally, supervisors should assess the capacity of subordinates to perform their duties. This could be considered as expressing questioning attitude on the behalf of a subordinate or watch team before procedures. This is often a problem in ship overhauls when supervisors are multitasking several procedures and grab an “available operator” to do something. Without validating that the operator is actually capable of doing the task (unlikely when multitasking), trouble often results.
After many “unskilled and unaware of it” fiascos in the shipyard, I insisted that my leaders aboard the ship validate operator capability in two parts (Kruger & Dunning, 1999). First, questioning whether the person about to be given a task has the capacity to do it. It can be expressed simply as “Have you done this before?”
The second form is questioning whether the subordinate has the skill to perform the task. This is done through detailed, specific questions about the task, anomalies to watch for, and appropriate responses to those anomalies. This can be done by saying “Get the procedure and discuss it with me. You can tell me what problems can occur and what you will be looking for.” If knowledge deficiencies or lack of experience can be corrected through a short training session, supervisors initiate this. If not, they need to obtain a replacement for that person.
Validating operator capability can feel tedious (that’s what my leaders told me), especially when a shipyard manager is pressing to get something done. Don’t blame the shipyard personnel, it’s their job to push. They can push, but they can’t make you go faster or force you to do something badly. Those have to be your choices.
In either case, a supervisor can adjust the task for a subordinate’s experience or lack of familiarity. This can be done by breaking the task into smaller parts and reporting after each is complete. This gives the supervisor the opportunity to check results incrementally. Another option is supervising the performance of the task more closely. Finally, the supervisor can call for more experienced personnel to perform or assist with the task.
Speaking Up-A Soft Skill
Questioning attitude has a foundation in technical knowledge. Operators have to know what to expect and ground their dissent in this technical foundation. They have to articulate why they suspect something might be wrong. Articulating a concern based on a questioning attitude is also a “soft” skill. Soft skills are generalized job-related skills that focus on interactions with people and whose application is highly dependent on context (Whitmore and Fry, 1974). That makes its practice hard to define succinctly and difficult to teach except through examples and after critiques.
Questioning attitude accomplishes very little unless operators speak up. Expressing a dissenting view against a majority or someone in authority does not come easily to most people. Many studies have produced results that people doubt their own senses and agree with the majority even when the majority is wrong (Asch, 1956; Bond & Smith, 1996).
Questioning attitude is multifaceted and can seem nebulous to the less experienced. It is frequently taught through examples of its absence after problems. Other means of inculcating questioning attitude are modeling (senior leaders can seek out divergent views), and stories (giving examples when questioning attitude made a significant difference).
There are two social aspects of questioning attitude that make internalizing it particularly challenging. First, initiating a challenge, particularly to superiors, is a social skill that has to be cultivated, particularly in hierarchical organizations. It does not come easily to junior operators in a culture based on rank like the Navy. Absent strong cultural and leader support, few people will willingly subject themselves to potential embarrassment and ridicule by speaking up in moments of uncertainty. The social norm is to keep quiet.
Second, seriously considering questions posed by a subordinate or peer opens one to the possibility of having to admit weaknesses. This isn’t easy for senior personnel. A key aspect of professional identity construction is one’s technical knowledge (Day, Harrison, & Halpin, 2008; Helmreich, 1999; Nikunen, 2014). People in positions of authority or with experience in the Navy are trained to encourage and support operators when they take the initiative to speak up about potential problems. They do this as a way to “normalize” what would otherwise be abnormal behavior (i.e., willingness to embarrass the man in charge).
Overcoming Resistance to Speaking Up
In the Navy, resistance to accepting challenges to expertise is overcome primarily through two practices. The first is through rigorous examination of performance during post-event critiques. In High Reliability Organizing (HRO), unexpected, unintended, or undesirable results are investigated thoroughly in critiques.
Critiques are institutionalized practices for learning from error. In the group setting of a critique, often with senior officers and regulators present, every aspect of an operator’s performance is laid bare for examination and criticism. The overriding emphasis at critiques is on comparing actual performance to the standard. Intentions, hunches, and feelings have no place at a critique. Having one’s performance criticized extensively at a critique is a humbling and emotionally painful experience. Being the focus of a critique for not listening to members of one’s team is a wonderful way to encourage changes in behavior.
The second method for breaking down resistance to accepting criticism is specifically calling attention to defensiveness. This can be done during critiques or private performance counseling. Operators quickly learn that defensiveness during critiques or personal counseling is unacceptable because it is an obstacle to learning. Since defending your actions is normal outside of HRO, it has to be painfully “unlearned” at critiques.
Conclusion
Questioning attitude is a skill and a decision. One has to be skilled to collect data from hypotheses of what is going on. As a skill, it can be improved with practice. It is also a decision to take a particular perspective on the world: accept nothing at face value. Voicing a dissenting opinion isn’t easy because of strong, often unconscious, social pressures to conform to the majority view. Questioning attitude isn’t a cure for confirmation bias, but it is a good way to fight it. Questioning attitude is operationalized through behavior backed up by ways of thinking about work. It can’t be proceduralized because it’s how you DO procedures. Speaking up with a dissenting view against a majority or someone in authority does not come easily so you shouldn’t expect it to happen without constant reinforcement.
