The Sunday Rule Book

A senior manager in a very large organisation introduced me to the Sunday Rule Book and in doing so, articulated an idea that I realise I have been working with for a long time.? The Sunday Rule Book contains the rules people follow when there are no managers to oversee their work.? As a virtual book, it contains not the proper rules, but the rules that everyone who does the job agrees are good enough.? They may not be the ones that managers think their teams are following but they are the rules that, in the view of those doing the job make people safe enough.

I find it interesting that one of the biggest threats workers can make to organisations is to work to rule.? That is, a recognition that if we the workers work only following all the rules, then the organisation grinds to a halt.? There is a tacit contract between employer and employee that no one is expected to work following all the rules.? Often these are HR rules around contract hours, holidays, etc. but there is a very clear message sent to everyone, sometimes we do not expect you to follow all the rules.

Having provided our work force with tacit (or even explicit) permission not to follow some rules, we are surprised when workers choose not to follow other rules.? We see many symptoms of this.? Statements such as:

“Don’t ask me how I did it…”

“It’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission..,”

“Just **** do it”

Are all statements of exemption, we tolerate huge deviation, and the work gets done.? When things go wrong, the first focus of any investigation is on the individual who was stupid, who broke the rules, who acted in a very irresponsible manner.? Yet the day before, that very same worker was lauded as a person who got the job done, who was the go-to person and could cut through all the red tape that hampered us doing the job quickly and effectively.

It can be hard to spot when the Sunday Rule Book is being applied.? It generally involves working nights, working remotely, having Chatham House Rule conversations with those who are undertaking the work, whilst they are working.? It is almost always worthwhile doing this.

We worked with organisations who employed versions of the Active Monitoring/Go-Look-See approach to spotting challenges and work rounds.? Put simply, it involves managers (including the most senior) and Team Leaders going to places they don’t normally work or with people they don’t work with and talking to them whilst they are doing the work. Avoiding the challenging yes/no questions and any suggestion of audit and being more considerate and probing.? Consider two possible conversations with a cleaner late at night, in the first we ask three closed questions that tell us nothing:

“Have you been trained to use that machine?” – “Yes”

“Do you use the correct PPE?” – “Yes”

“Are you able to work safely?” – “Yes”

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Alternatively:

“Which are the hardest places to clean?” – “detailed response”

“How can we make your job easier?” - “detailed response”

“What is the biggest challenge you face?” - “detailed response”

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There are no set questions, but we are sure that visible leadership and people being actively curious about how work is undertaken can produce remarkable insights and contribute to a safer work place.?

There is, I am sure, an apocryphal story about a member of the previous Government who wandered around putting post-it notes on people’s desks and terminals demanding that they return to work from working at home.? The notes lost some of their power when they were liberally applied to the hot desks and shared work environments deliberately designed to promote working from home and allowing the Government to reduce its footprint (and save costs).? Failure to understand how people actually work is a fundamental challenge to improving the workplace.? Understanding what people do, how and why they do it and the application of the Sunday Rule Book can be central to making people happier and safer.

The concept of “safe enough” allows most of us to function, from driving a car to changing a light bulb there is normally a safe way, this is about following all the rules way and then there is the "safe enough way".? We have done it this way a hundred times and nothing bad has happened, then when the bad thing happens it attributed to us, it is because we are bad people.

The focus on rules and procedures actively induces people to lie.? They know that if it is proven that they are following the Sunday Rule Book, then the blame will be on them. We worked on investigating an accident involving an ambulance and a gurney that was not clamped into the back of the ambulance.? We interviewed those involved to understand what had happened.? We were told definitively that the gurney was clamped and that the clamping was checked and cross-checked.? The identical stories raised some concerns.? How could different people tell us identical stories? These concerns were confirmed when we attempted to check the way in which the clamps attached to the gurney.? It turned out that someone had procured gurneys which were incompatible with the clamps.? They physically could not be attached and yet we were given assurances that they were attached, cross checked and were safe.? Later we explored with those who told us the story to explain not why their version of events could not be true but what they thought was the purpose of the accident investigation. We were told, again definitively, that the investigation was about working out who was to blame so that they could be sacked. We explored why design faults might not be reported and the answer was cost and time.? If you reported a problem that cost money, took time or effected the smooth running of the operation then the perception was that you would be blamed.? Chomsky’s idea of not speaking truth to power and its consequence if you do is a real driver for not being truthful.

Yet we need to follow the Sunday Rule Book if we are to hit or exceed targets.? So, what can we do?? Firstly, distinguish between Safety, the rules, processes and procedures designed to make us safe and the feeling of being Safe.? If there is a mismatch, when there is no one around we will typically revert to acting in a way which makes us feel safe enough.? We need to decide what about Safety really matters and make the barriers to ignoring Safety sufficiently tough, that the default will be to be Safe by acting in accordance with Safety.? If we inundate people with Safety we support the creation of the Sunday Rule Book.? Myths such as Bird’s (Heinrich’s) Triangle encourage organisations to focus on the wrong things.? They think that there is a causal relationship between trivial rule breaking with fatalities.? They believe that having complex Safety Systems supported by hundreds or even thousands of rules will make us safe, right up until the fatality.? I worked with a very wise man.? He introduced me to the idea of bigger than a headful.? It something, a concept, a set of rules, anything was bigger that one person could get their head around, they would be unable to act on the knowledge.? I am not saying this is always a reason to cut all rules.? I am a big fan of Gwande’s checklists (listen to his Reith lecture).? I completely accept that in safety critical environments workers need more support.? However, the ability of managers and in particular senior managers to tolerate Sunday Rule Book operations until it all goes wrong seems fundamentally flawed.

Paul Moore, who was sacked by HBOS for whistleblowing and drawing attention to what was going on, perfectly illustrates the problem of the Sunday Rule Book:

“To mix a few well known similes / metaphors / stories, the current financial crisis is a bit like the story of the Emperor’s new clothes. Anyone whose eyes were not blinded by money, power and pride (Hubris) who really looked carefully knew there was something wrong and that economic growth based almost solely on excessive consumer spending based on excessive consumer credit based on massively increasing property prices which were caused by the very same excessively easy credit could only ultimately lead to disaster.”

We can apply this to organisations who are running operations.? To re-frame the quote:

“Anyone who eyes are not blinded by targets, production goals and output, who really looks carefully knows that there is something wrong and that performance can only be based on workers cutting corners, working outside of the Safety Rules and that this can only ultimately lead to disaster”.