Inviting ownership
"If people were incentivised enough to do a risk assessment before every task, our incidents would disappear overnight."
I heard this through an open boardroom door, waiting to present my part of the agenda. A board member, speaking with conviction during the break. And I've been thinking about it since. It's such a simple, tantalising notion. That if we only made people sufficiently accountable, the problem would go away.
Of course we want people to feel responsible for one another. We want safety to be genuinely owned rather than simply complied with. Yet our primary response is usually to strengthen accountability through clearer roles, greater oversight and sharper consequences. These things matter, but they can also change what people become accountable to, shifting attention from colleagues and purpose towards audits, metrics and managers.
A Dutch traffic engineer named Hans Monderman saw something similar at work in the 1980s. His insight was about what kind of social situation produces people who naturally behave well.
The technical engineer said: people are driving too fast. How do we get people to behave safely? We need another sign, a campaign, more speed bumps, an enforcement campaign. More accountability mechanisms.
Monderman asked a different question: what kind of environment produces people who naturally behave more responsibly?
So instead of adding signs or speed bumps, he removed them. At a busy intersection in Drachten, with more than 20,000 vehicles a day, he took away everything. Signs, kerbs, traffic lights, road markings. Just a shared space. For people to work out speed, who goes first,to look after each other..
What happened was that drivers slowed down. People made eye contact. They read each other, negotiated passage, took responsibility for the space they shared. Accidents fell from eight per year to one.
Monderman redesigned the relationship between people and the space they moved through together. When people were not given the solution, they became the solution. Monderman created conditions in which people felt genuinely implicated in each other's safety. I'm not suggesting organisations should remove procedures in the way Monderman removed signs. What I think transfers is the principle: behaviour changes when we redesign relationships, not only when we redesign controls.
Responsibility is a relationship between a person and something that they have come to care about. I’m responsible for this because I care what happens to it, to the people it affects, to the work it represents, to the kind of person I want to be. Organisations can require compliance. Responsibility has to become personal.
Which is why I don't think the board member's solution reaches the heart of the problem. Incentivise risk assessments and you get people who complete risk assessments. You don't necessarily get people who feel responsible for what happens next. The form and the feeling are completely different things. One can be measured, whereas the other has to be nurtured.
Responsibility has to be assumed. That doesn't mean accountability mechanisms have no place. Clear expectations, defined roles and thoughtful consequences all matter. But they are at their best when they support responsibility rather than substitute for it.
Organisations that get this right are places where people are invited to help shape both the destination and the path. Where people are invited to contribute to how good work gets done. People follow through because they recognise themselves in what is being asked.
If you want to cultivate responsibility, conversations are a great place to start. Some questions to explore this are:
What's important to you?
What are you trying to achieve, and what do you not want to happen?
This is what I think needs to happen, but what do you think?
How do you contribute to X?
Who does this job well? What do they do?
Questions like these create the conditions for responsibility to emerge, become something we reflect on. Something to explore, discover and nurture.
Perhaps we've been asking the wrong question.
Instead of focussing on, "How do we hold people accountable?"
perhaps we’re better off asking, "How do we invite people to assume responsibility?"
Because those are different leadership tasks. One is about assigning obligations. The other is about helping people make those obligations their own.
Monderman had a maxim he returned to often. "When you treat people like idiots, they'll behave like idiots." The inverse is equally true.When you treat people like intelligent collaborators, then they are more likely to behave as such. And that, perhaps, is where genuine ownership begins.
-Daniel
PS — Ron Gantt and I are hosting a live conversation about safety conversations on 18 August. If you'd like to join us, you can register here.