The last posting made an
observation. That was that successfully
run enterprises – either public or private – can, because of their competencies,
land up committing serious blunders that lead to extremely costly even terminal
results for that entity. The posting
cites a social scientist that has pointed out this possibility; that being Sidney
Dekker with the assistance of Shawn Pruchnicki.[1] If the reader has not read that posting,
he/she is encouraged to do so.
But
for those who do not or those who need a bit of a reminder, here are the
reasons these two writers give for their overall conclusion:
·
Larger, successful organizations usually
operate in environments of pressures due to (1) scarcity of resources and
competition against other entities, (2) an imposed lack of transparency with
sprawling, complex structures, (3) information being pre-formatted in a developed
style or language, and (4) the usual incremental pacing of decision-making becoming
more incremental over time.
·
Accepted ways and beliefs that develop to
protect the organization (e.g., risk assessment or risk management strategies
and personnel) encourage false confidence in them and serve to obstruct seeing
what “is not known.”
·
Structural elements that seek the
“unknown” have counter forces, i.e., costs involved with uncertain technologies
and un or underdeveloped knowledge and technologies associated with change. These potential costs tend to be compared to
the incremental nature of incubating problems.
·
If needed, transformational change
(calling for changes in beliefs, attitudes, and/or values) is judged against
the pressures of scarcity and competition, making needed change appear to be
impossible – even when they are not – or just too expensive.
·
And
Organisations incubate accident not
because they are doing all kinds of things wrong, but because they are doing
most things right. And what they
measure, count, record, tabulate and learn, even inside of their own safety
management system, regulatory approval, auditing systems or loss prevention
systems, might suggest nothing to the contrary.[2]
These
are the conditions that lead to problems developing and going unnoticed. Dekker and Pruchnicki call the time in which
those problems are not detected as incubation.
That
posting makes the further claim that all this has to do with the creation and maintenance
of the current state of polarization the nation is suffering from in its
politics. The posting left the reader
with the promise that this posting will indicate what the connection between
“incubation” and polarization is. The
journalist Ezra Klein makes that connection.[3]
The
national set of problems, the ones over which the populous is more and more
divided, has mushroomed because of their link to one another. Two webs of problems have resulted in short
order but after a long-lasting incubation had taken place. The issues range from race to taxes to
religion to abortion to firearms, etc. And these are only the ones that come readily
to this writer’s mind.
Outside
of the people who had been affected directly by each of these problems, they, individually,
were mostly ignored for decades; they grew and were linked to more and more adjacent
or related problems. But they are now
more than visible, they are riotously blaring on people’s consciousness. They are visible and measured as being of such
magnitude and complexity they elude single targeted “solutions.” They have burrowed themselves into such depths
that they have become systemic. And as
such, are immune to reductionist study or reductionist solutions.
In
part, that is so because the whole complex of problems has become so
intermingled that one does not derive a position in one without finding oneself
taking sides in a multitude of issues.
As Klein states,
[T]he story … is the logic of
polarization. That logic, put simply, is
this: to appeal to a more polarized
public, political institutions and political actors behave in more polarized
ways. As political institutions and
actors become more polarized, they further polarize the public. This sets off a feedback cycle to appeal to a
yet more polarized public, institutions must polarize further; when faced with
yet more polarized institutions, the public polarizes further, and so on.
Understanding
that we exist in relationship with our political institutions, that they are
changed by us and we are changed by them, is the key to this story. We don’t just use politics for our own
ends. Politics uses us for its own ends.[4]
As
Dekker and Pruchnicki point out, the systemic ways hinder or obstruct the
entity, be it a person, an organization, or a nation, from seeing what is. In the case of polarization, the systemic way
is its politics or political mode of behavior and thinking.
The
case is that polarization in this issue or that one began to be chained together. The natural tendency is to make alliances
unless one has enormous resources (then the opposite happens – those actors
seek isolation). But if the numbers get
so big, enormity loses its relative meaning – all are in need of allies because
no one is facing a single opponent or competitor.
This politicization finds, therefore, a
person falling in one side of the divide or the other. Therefore, one finds Evangelicals teaming
with police associations and with large corporate heads that seek tax
reductions. Or one has Black Lives
Matter advocates teaming with socialists seeking socialized medicine and with those
who simply want to raise the minimum wage.
And
the thing is, this characterization has grown to such a magnitude, that all
politically active actors find it necessary to fall within one of the two grand
alliances – polarization leads to more polarization. And to an advocate of a federated citizenry,
this becomes a political landscape of enormous challenge (or is it a political
nightmare?).
[1]
Sidney Dekker and Shawn
Pruchnicki, “Drifting into Failure:
Theorising the Dynamics of Disaster Incubation,” Theoretical Issues
in Ergonomics Science, 2013, accessed 7/8/2020, https://safetydifferently.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/SDDriftPaper.pdf , 1-11.
[2]
Ibid., 8 (Australian spelling).
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