When Cutting Corners Becomes the Norm
Airlines, aircraft safety analysts, and organizational effectiveness managers use ‘normalizing operational deviance’ to describe when someone consistently violates policies and procedures until it becomes a standard method of operations. This concept often comes up when the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) reports on airplane accidents that were due to pilot negligence in not following standard procedures. For example, when a pilot in landing or take-off and makes too sharp a turn leading to a wing stall and the plane crashes. Another cases, is when an inexperienced private pilot fails to follow standard procedures during bad weather when landing at a busy commercial airport and crashes.
Non-aviation organizations are also susceptible to ‘normalizing operational deviance’, but there outcomes may not be as catastrophic as a plane wreck. Nevertheless, failing to follow procedures can result in strategic failures, overspending, violation of debt conditions, or significant accreditation problems.
Here are several examples of ‘normalizing deviance’ in colleges.
- Academic programs that do not closely monitor transcripts, which results in students graduating without earning the required credits. Both financial auditors and accreditors may catch this problem, and they can require the colleges to tell graduates that they did not accumulate sufficient credits to graduate and will then have to return to earn the missing credits. This is a very messy business because graduates do not want to return to classes, and they do not want to pay for the college’s mistake.
- President and chief academic officers that fail to develop rigorous operational plans to implement college strategies, which results in strategic expectations being dashed because critical steps were never taken. Over time, the chief leadership of the college assumes that all is well with their strategies until the plans fail leaving the college in deep financial and academic distress.
- Business offices too often pay for the purchases made by college employees who did not follow standard approval procedures. These unauthorized purchases can grow to a point where they lead to large budget over-runs. An unfortunate aspect of unauthorized purchases is that they distort budget and strategic plans by diverting financial resources to serve the interest of a department or an employee and not the college. By normalizing this deviant behavior, colleges are often surprised to discover that these unauthorized purchases are hard to control and can quickly deplete cash reserves.
- Equipment purchases are not tracked by the business office, which can lead to the loss of costly items. These losses often are not recognized until a fixed asset audit is conducted
- In some cases, presidents and chief buildings officers do not hire an independent construction manager to monitor construction so that the college can save money. The result is that they depend on the contractor to honestly follow speciation’s and regulations. If mistakes occur, material and design specifications are not followed, or local government building and zonings regulations are ignored, projects are delayed or expensive changes are needed, which result in cost overruns of the project. Long-term problems can show-up when equipment, materials, and sub-structures begin to fail. Even if the building is insured, insurance companies may reduce or reject claims because they believe the problems were caused by the negligence on the part of the college.
- IT can be problematic when the system is not set-up for consistent and regular backup, changes are not documented, the system is not updated, or system errors are allowed to linger and are not fixed.
In sum, normalizing operational deviance can lead to complacency, which could result in major system failures.