Culture Pre-Mortem: Avoiding Disaster

In Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, one of the key characters, Mike Campbell, is asked:

“How did you go bankrupt?”

“Two ways,” he answers. “Gradually, then suddenly.”

Gradually, then suddenly

On 28 November 1979, Air New Zealand Flight 901 took off on a sightseeing flight of Antarctica. The whole plane was the first-class cabin. 227 passengers on board enjoyed drinks, conversations, and breathtaking landscapes. The cockpit door was often open, and passengers could chat with the flight crew. Everyone was taking photographs and filming out of the cabin windows. The atmosphere was festive and relaxed.

Before lunch, which was to include a choice of chicken Souvaroff, prawns, scallops, steak, and peach Erebus for dessert, Captain Jim Collins flew two large loops through the clouds. He wanted to bring the plane down to about 2,000ft (610m) to offer his passengers an even better view.

This is when, suddenly, the proximity alarms went off. At that point, Captain Collins must have realized that what he thought to be clouds and swaths of ice in the distance was something else entirely. With no time to pull up, the plane ploughed straight into a gigantic mass. None of the 227 passengers and 30 crew members survived the crash.

We will never know if Captain Collins had time to realize that what suddenly appeared right in front of his cockpit was Mount Erebus, the second-highest volcano in Antarctica. What we do know is that unbeknownst to him, his aircraft was gradually approaching the volcano from the time the plane took off from Auckland Airport at 8:15 am. That is 4 hours of cruising towards disaster.

How was that even possible with an experienced crew and modern aviation tools?

The main reason was a 2-degree shift in the coordinates of the flight made by the ground crew the night before. Captain Collins was not informed of the change. While he thought he was flying towards McMurdo Sound, his plane was gradually being re-routed to a path toward Mount Erebus. And then, it was too late to course-correct.

This is how most disasters tend to unfold: gradually at first, then suddenly.

How your team culture goes off-course

You often miss them at first — the small, gradual changes that take your team off-course. Poor decisions on trivial matters, inefficiencies, tiny breaches of trust, seemingly inconsequential misbehaviour, little signs of disrespect, and unresolved frustrations. They seem harmless. But, as James Clear writes in Atomic Habits:

“What starts as (…) a minor setback accumulates into something much more.”

Here is how compounding works:

If your weight is within a healthy range today, but you eat 125 calories above your daily limit every day (the equivalent of a large banana), you could become clinically obese in just 30 months.

The same compounding dynamics are at work when it comes to your team culture. If you don’t nip seemingly inconsequential transgressions in the bud, they will intensify and multiply over time. Gradually — and then suddenly — tiny dysfunctions can take even the smartest, most capable team off its course.

Course-correct to keep your team on track

Being off-course is not a problem in itself. Planes are typically off-course 90% of the time because of turbulence and other weather conditions. And yet, the industry average of on-time arrivals (OTA) has been around 85% for years. In January 2020, the average delay of all flights was only 8 minutes.

Most planes arrive at their destination on time because they have pilots and sophisticated avionics to course-correct all the time. If they didn’t — or if they operated on false assumptions, like Air New Zealand Flight 901, they would crash.

Your team and your culture will inevitably be off-course most of the time. While many leaders think that their team’s journey towards a healthy culture will follow a straight path, in reality, the path is squiggly, loopy, and messy.

Maintaining a healthy culture never follows this sequence:

1. Crafting cool-sounding mission, vision, and values statements.
2. Proclaiming that your lofty ideals will guide you in everything you do from now on.
3. Turning on cruise control.
4. Sipping Margaritas and relaxing until you arrive.

If you have been guilty of the above scenario, you have settled.

When I interviewed the father of organizational culture, Ed Schein, for the CultureLab Podcast, he quipped:

When it comes to culture, you get what you settle for.

This is what it means in practice:

Your culture can only be as good as the worst behaviors that you are willing to tolerate.

It’s because the impact of consistent behaviour compounds over time.

If you don’t want to find yourself grossly off course, course-correct.

Every. Single. Day.

Creeping normality

Because culture gets eroded so gradually, it’s often hard to notice that you are off-course. Many factors make course correction challenging, but the main one is creeping normality.

Creeping normality is a term coined by an American scientist, Jared Diamond. In his 2005 book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, he explores why ancient societies such as Maya, Inca or the Polynesian society in Easter Island disappeared. He concluded that what led to their demise was long term environmental degradation.

Grappling with questions such as: “Why would Easter Islanders chop down the last tree on their island?” he concluded that when a major negative change happens gradually, in small, incremental stages, we accept it as normal.

Societal examples that we can all probably relate to include a gradual loss of our legal rights such as privacy, climate change, diseases that become common due to changes in lifestyle and diet or growing inequalities between rich and poor. We disapprove, but somehow, we have grown to consider them normal.

Detect creeping normality in your team

It’s possible to detect creeping normality early on, provided you are willing to discuss things openly. I use an exercise with my clients to help them identify and address it. I adopted it from The Pre-Mortem game credited to James Macanufo in Game Storming by Dave Grey et al.

Team culture pre-mortem

Usually, we hear culture-gone-off-course stories when things get completely out of hand, and the collateral damage is out in the open for everyone to see — think Wells Fargo, Volkswagen, Boeing, or Uber.

Some cultural disasters happen away from the media spotlight but are no less painful for the survivors. They happen because we tend to sleepwalk through the gradual changes and are only jolted into alertness by the sudden bang of a shattering impact. Later, when we benefit from hindsight, we eagerly perform postmortems, estimating the damage and pointing out all the dysfunctions that led to the disaster. But why wait for things to go that far off-course?

A culture pre-mortem* is a way to create a space for your team to address your team culture risks directly. It’s best to conduct the activity after discussing your team’s purpose and your essential intent. This way, you set the necessary context to have a culture conversation.

The exercise starts with a straightforward question:

How did this end in disaster?

You are projecting yourself into the future and imagining your team failed miserably. It happened — your worst fears materialized. You look at the wreckage and figure out how it could all go so terribly haywire.

From the vantage point of the future, you will look back at the present reality of your team and discuss how you worked and which of the patterns that you had developed caused you to veer off-course. What stood in the way of your purpose, your essential intent, and your key goals? Here are a few examples from a client of mine:

• We always sought consensus, which took us too long to decide on vital issues and diluted the best ideas.
• We didn’t voice critical opinions openly and on time — we tried to be nice instead of kind.
• We assumed that long hours equal hard work, and people got burnt out.
• We focused too much on existing experience and too little on learning.
• We didn’t learn from our mistakes.

You want a long list of these, so brainstorm for approximately 30 minutes.

If it helps, you can look at the following areas:

1. Purpose — how you orient and steer around your purpose.
2. Strategy — how you plan and prioritize.
3. Power — how you view it, share it and how you take decisions.
4. Workflow — how you organize, divide and share work.
5. Info — how you use and share data.
6. Innovation — how you come up with new ways of doing things.
7. Learning — how you learn and improve.
8. Gatherings — how and why you meet.
9. Connection — how you nurture and grow relationships.
10. Rewards — how you reward and celebrate.

This exercise is an excellent opportunity for your team to reflect on your collective experience and address some elephants in the room. Let your imaginations loose. Conjure images of what can go horribly wrong if you don’t course correct. It’s a chance to voice concerns that might otherwise go unaddressed until it’s too late.

If you are a small team, a discussion might be enough to surface the issues. If the group is larger, use post-its, group them, and find common themes.

The objective of this exercise is to identify your creeping normality and decide what actions you will need to take to course-correct. After you have your long list of concerns, prioritize the items. Which ones do you need to address immediately? How?

Make sure that you follow up on progress and do the exercise regularly because creeping normality never goes away.

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