Harry 0:00

The framing around this is the idea that things are just accidents is not really the best way to think about it when you think about it from a professional transportation company's point of view. Because most of the time, the vast majority of time, these things are preventable.

Narrator 0:23

You're listening to Traction Heroes. Digging In to Get Results with Harry Max and Jorge Arango.

Harry 0:34

Hey, Jorge. It's great to see you today.

Jorge 0:36

It's great to see you too, Harry.

Harry 0:38

So you probably recall, I think one of our first episodes, we talked about an experience I had where I had a rough encounter with a four-door Chevrolet while I was on a bicycle. And, fast-forward many years and here we are, and I find myself working with a trucking company right now. One of my clients is a big software vendor in the trucking and logistics space, and I've been doing a bunch of research and I stumbled on something I wanted to, to share with you, because I think it's It touches on so many of the themes around traction and sort of leadership that we, that we discuss on and on. So if I may, the reading's a little on the short side, and I'll share with you the title, which is great. after the reading. Okay. "It's stunning how often simple safety checks were not carried out on tractor-trailers that subsequently crashed. Things that could have been fixed easily. Human error or judgment is not usually the cause of the collision, but rather it is the driver's failure to make simple routine checks he should make every time he gets behind the wheel to make sure his truck is safe as possible and he won't needlessly endanger the public. These checks usually take only five or ten minutes before the driver gets behind the wheel of the truck. If drivers are not reminded regularly and the routine is not hammered into them every day at work, they start to cut corners. When one thing goes wrong, two or three things may also go wrong. If not addressed, a small problem that might not cause a collision or might simply alert the driver to pull off the road can develop into the cause of a collision, or at least cause a lot more damage than it otherwise would have, and even endanger life. Let's return to the accountability of the tractor-trailer drivers and how collisions with tractor-trailers are different. Say you've been hit by a tractor-trailer from behind. The thing most people think immediately of is that the tractor-trailer was either driving too fast or followed too closely. In a lot of cases, one or both of these conditions is the cause of the collision and is easy to determine without a great deal of investigation. But with a tractor-trailer collision, there are many other possibilities that also need to be explored. Were there things that could have been done days, weeks, or even hours earlier that would have prevented this wreck? Usually, there are a lot of things." And I'll stop there.

Jorge 3:38

I haven't read this book, but what came to mind is Atul Gawande's book, The Checklist Manifesto, I think it's called.

Harry 3:47

Yeah. Yeah, that's a great call-out. that was not from Checklist Manifesto. This is from a book called There Are No Accidents, Only Collisions by Alan Levar. I'm not quite sure how to pronounce his last name. And it seemed incredibly relevant partly because of the work I'm doing with this trucking company right now, and part of because so many of the discussions we're having are around and rotate around the topic of leadership clarity, which isn't just about being clear in the moment, but it's about projecting that clarity into the future, using that clarity to evaluate the past, and to avoid potentially avoidable situations that may come up, to correctly assess what's happening in the now, and to learn from what's happened in the past, and to take that learning into the present and project it into the future. And the title of the book alone is worth the price of admission here, right? Because the framing around this is the idea that things are just accidents is not really the best way to think about it when you think about it from a professional transportation company's point of view. Because most of the time, the vast majority of time, these things are preventable. And by calling them accidents, you're actually inadvertently removing the accountability from the equation and disavowing the responsibility to take more agency and and really involve yourself in the process of preventing problems from occurring to begin with.

Jorge 5:36

So you used two words that came to mind as you were talking about it. One was learning and the other is accountability, right? The word accident implies, "Hey, it just happened." The stars were misaligned or something and we hit them or whatever.

Harry 5:54

Yeah.

Jorge 5:56

And by framing it as a distinction there, that implication came through. And the other thing that came across when you were talking about it is that drafting a checklist implies that we may have gone through something like this in the past and have come up with preemptive measures to avoid it happening again, which to me feels like a really actionable articulation of learning. Learning can be somewhat theoretical, but, this is the opposite of that. This is like, how do you make the learning very practical and very actionable?

Harry 6:34

Yeah. And the other thing too is it points back to a series of conversations we've had even fairly recently around being attuned to messages and alerts and signals. And when you have a checklist and you know there are a set of things you should be paying attention to, those things are often informational. They're not necessarily things you need to do. They're things you need to pay attention to. And it reminds me a little bit of Nelson Pass, who's the president of Pass Labs, which makes very high-end audio amplification equipment. He's kinda the father of the do it yourself DIY movement in the audiophile space. And when I interviewed him for my book, I was like, "My God, Nelson, you do so much stuff." And I said, "How do you do it?" And he said, "I don't have a to-do list. I have a to think about list." And, I'm like, "That's cool." He goes, "Because anything you're gonna do, you should have thought about." And he goes, "So, I don't worry about what I do, I worry about what I need to think about." And that was another thing that changed how I started looking at checklists and how I started looking at routines to carve a path to a better future.

Jorge 8:03

I'm trying to imagine what a checklist might look like to avoid a collision with a tractor-trailer. Can you give us an example, like a tangible example of what a checklist might look like in that scenario?

Harry 8:22

Yeah. Let me... before I go to the checklist, I popped open another book here called Four Types of Problems, by Art Smalley. And he has four categories of problems, and I believe there are many, many more. That's... We can talk about that later. But he talks about troubleshooting problems, gaps from standard, target conditions, and open-ended, where troubleshooting is reactive problem-solving that hinges on a quick response and dealing with immediate symptoms. And so, when you look at creating a checklist, you can build a checklist based on these four categories, right? You can say, "Are there areas where if I pay attention to symptoms, then I will likely reduce the probability that something unintended and negative will happen," right? Then he talks about gap from standard, which is a structural problem that focuses on a specific definition of how something should be functioning. For example, tire pressure, right? Tire pressure is a standard on a truck and is a very common form of failure in a truck, right? That's very different from troubleshooting, right? Troubleshooting might be, am I noticing a symptom, something that appears to be failing, either a message or a signal or an alert, or do I see something symptomatic, a sign, if you will, of something that might be starting to fail, which is very different from, can I take a quick measurement and determine whether something is sitting in a standard, versus a target condition, an area where you go beyond the existing levels or standards of performance for the purposes of trying to improve continuously. And this might be something where, sure, it's one thing to make sure that your windshield wipers are at a particular level. It's another thing to start your day off with a clean windshield, right? So, your gap from standard might be making sure your windshield wipers work, but your target condition might be cleaning your windshield before you get on the road. And then there are open-ended types of things, innovative problem-solving based on creativity, synthesis, recognition of an opportunity. So this is an area where you might evaluate the type of trip you're gonna go on, and you might do something like... i'm failing miserably to come up with a great example right now. So I'm gonna leave the last category, and not try to consume a bunch of airtime thinking up something there. But certainly for the other three categories of troubleshooting gaps from standard and target conditions, I think those are categories of things you can very clearly spell out in an area of a checklist, and you can... if I were responsible for a 50,000-pound truck, I might be looking for areas where there are things that I could be doing that are above and beyond the standards that increase the probability that I'm gonna be able to get where I'm gonna go and gonna be able to do it with alacrity. I'm gonna be making sure that there are things that I can check on a regular basis that are just industry standard data points that will tell me that the likelihood I'm gonna have a failure based on missing something that I should have known, something like tire pressure, is something that's handled. And am I paying attention to the signs and messages and alerts and symptoms. One of the common things that happens is, alert signals and alert lights, like a dashboard light, can go out. Do you ever get in your car and intentionally turn your key on and not start your car and just make sure that your check engine light works? Most people don't do that, right? They're immune to those signals. But if you're a truck driver and you're responsible for... this is your job to be on the road and be safe and to go from one place to another to pick up a load, to drop it off, to make sure everything happens properly, maybe paying extra attention to things like indicator lights and just make sure they work is, very, very easy to do. It just requires a little bit more attention than one would otherwise pay to a system that reduces the probability that something's gonna happen that could have been accounted for.

Jorge 13:20

When you said earlier that this was about learning, where my mind went was like, "Well, this is learning based on experience," right? Like, we had an accident before because of this, so now we have a checklist step or an item in the checklist that helps us prevent that. But it sounds like it's more nuanced than that. Of the four types of problems, maybe like only the first one speaks to that kind of knowledge, that kind of learning in that troubleshooting implies that you've had trouble, right?

Harry 13:55

Right.

Jorge 13:56

And the second one in particular, when you said gaps from a standard, I did assume that there would be industry standards for things like what's the acceptable load for this kind of truck or whatever. I don't know. I'm making stuff up, right? But what that brings to mind is that some of the items in your checklist might be based on firsthand experience, or maybe not yours personally, but someone within your group has had firsthand experience that has caused you to articulate a solution to that. And then there are items that are not based on firsthand experience, but they are based on standards or what is accepted within our community of practice. Truck drivers do this and they do it regularly for reasons, right? So there's this distinction between what we can maybe think of as expert knowledge versus empirical knowledge. That's not fair because, I think that if, someone who is in a practice for a long time develops expert knowledge maybe through empirical observation of what's happening. But I'm saying, not everything has to come to you through first-hand experience. You can learn from what other people who have come before you have already encoded, right? And I'm kinda calling that out because at least for some things in our society, we are living in a time when expertise isn't as valued as it was before. And I'm wondering how people are using things like checklists, particularly when they are recommended guidelines, recommended by industry bodies or, "experts", right? I wonder if there's a hesitancy, and I'm... Let me tell you why I'm asking it this way. Because in the back of my mind, I'm thinking that trucking is a field where I would expect there is long-lived knowledge because it has been going on for, what, 100 years? whereas there are other industries that are much newer, and a lot of the stuff that is happening with AI-driven products, like there aren't any standards yet. So we're having to learn as we go, and we're not quite prepared yet to articulate best practices in something as formal as a checklist. I don't know that there's a question there. I just wanted to observe this distinction between expert knowledge and empirical knowledge in the drafting of checklists.

Harry 16:47

It cuts kind of two ways. One way, I was reading an article yesterday about our fabulous company Toyota, is having issues, recall and legal issues. You know, unexpected failures in their eight-speed, relatively new eight-speed automatic transmission. When you buy the car, I guess in this case it's a Highlander, they tell you the transmission fluid will last 100,000 miles, but apparently the only way to reduce the likelihood that the transmission's gonna fail is make sure that you've had that transmission fluid changed at 50 to 60,000 miles, that you keep the transmission fluid changed. So there's a place where that standard is set by experts, and often people will ignore it. But for people that don't ignore it and pay attention to it, and then don't use their common sense to recognize that, and even though the recognized industry experts in the form of a reputable auto manufacturer are telling you that you can do something one way, there's a good chance that there are better opinions out there, more practical opinions, that are gonna save you a lot of money in the long term, and possibly save you a lot of grief if you don't necessarily follow what the experts have said, and instead do what the industry practices actually are. And then the flip side of that, I don't remember if we've ever talked about the book Drift Into Failure...

Jorge 18:25

No, I don't think we have.

Harry 18:28

It's by a fellow by the name of Sidney Dekker, and it was one of these books that really changed the way I saw the world. The subtitle is From Hunting Broken Components to Understanding Complex Systems. And the core idea behind the book is that a little bit like there's no such thing as accidents, only collisions, Sidney Dekker looks at how pretty significant structural failures happen in... And he uses the airline industry a lot, where very specific target maintenance schedules and procedures, and techniques are spelled out. And in the industry, in order to save money, what'll happen is they progressively deviate from that, and each deviation takes them further and further away from understanding the broader perspective that they should have been maintaining. And so, while in the local decision that they're making to defer a piece of maintenance, what they're actually doing is accruing damage over time to a system that ultimately, when it does fail, and they often do at the most unfortunate and unexpected moments, they're never attributable to the last maintenance. They're attributable to a long history of decisions where, in Dekker's case, cost-cutting is often the driver behind why it was something was deferred maybe a little bit longer than it otherwise should have been, right? And so, I think it's a very nuanced topic. But I think the Dekker book speaks to, I think, how we experience having to deal with kind of expensive and difficult maintenance often, because it's easy to justify changing the standard and how we deal with it in the moment. But if we lose sight of the fact there's a big picture, what Decker proposes is that we drift into failure and that these things then, unfortunately, lead to results that are very much the opposite of what we say we want. And I see that all the time, and I think it's one of the reasons I did that TEDx talk that I did on problem framing, The Problem Is Not The Problem was the name of that, because so many trend toward that category of wicked, right? They come back if you don't deal with them, and therefore you don't just try to solve them and put them away. You have to take a more intentional, proactive, and ongoing approach to attending to the things that are likely to lead to better outcomes.

Jorge 21:33

You know what comes to mind is that Hemingway line about, going broke. It's like, "How did you go broke? Two ways, gradually, then suddenly," right?

Harry 21:48

Yeah. Right

Jorge 21:52

And we talked recently about that cruise ship that slowly went off course, which I think is a related problem, right? The fact that we might drift towards failure by degrees without noticing that it's happening. We let down our guard just this once, and just the mere fact that you did it immediately casts you as the sort of person who lets down their guard. And next time, you might let down your guard again, and then, those things accrue. Are there ways... I'm just thinking now of the fact that we're running up on time here and wondering if there are ways that we can slap snow chains on this one. What can people do to avoid the drifting into failure? 'cause Where we started the conversation, it feels like the prescription is when engaging in something of import, have guidelines that you can follow, whether a checklist or some kind of standard or what have you, which implies that you are entering known territory. What can people do to avoid losing traction because they are somehow drifting by degrees?

Harry 23:20

So I'll answer metaphorically and then I'll answer practically. Metaphorically, it goes back to the, "When's the best time to plant a tree? Ten years ago. When's the second-best time to plant a tree? Right now." So, when was the best time to build a habit, to have a checklist, and to follow through on making sure that you are looking for symptoms and signs? And when is the best time you should be attending to managing to a standard? When is the best time you should be going through a continuous process? You should have started it years ago. Okay, but when's the second-best time? Now. And so, it's really about being intentional about what kind of future you're looking for and what your role in that is, and then starting to do the things day in and day out that will lead you toward a better future and help you avoid the kinds of problems that are, in all probability, going to occur at some very inconvenient moment.

Jorge 24:30

I'll add two more that came to mind as you were describing that. One is, there might be industry bodies, and you might not be aware of them, that might have best practices already encapsulated for whatever space you're working within, and then search those out. And then the other is a practice that anyone who's done any kind of project management, I think, has engaged in, which is the idea of a postmortem. It's like, whenever something happens, sit down and analyze what led to it, and maybe take the extra step of saying, "Okay, so how do we ensure this doesn't happen again?" And you do that explicitly. And I think that all of this falls under the rubric of organizational knowledge. And so much organizational knowledge these days is tacit and implicit in what we're talking about here is, "Hey, make that explicit!" And it feels like there's never been a better time to do that, given that AI is so good at transcribing things and synthesizing. So maybe there are opportunities there.

Harry 25:41

And I'm gonna just add perhaps a fine point to your comment of the retrospective or the postmortem, but Gary Klein suggests the notion of a premortem, right? And both postmortems and premortems are in the category of assumptive goal-setting, which is a topic I know we've talked about. But the idea behind a premortem is, put yourself in a position where you can imagine things have not gone well, right? Perhaps it's failed. And then go through the thought experiment to figure out what would have to have been true in order for that failure to occur? And so you're going through a thinking process to look at the likely causes of a failure you're trying to avoid, but you're doing it from a future projected position of imagining that failure has happened.

Jorge 26:31

Yeah, I've been in projects where we've done that. We've started with a pre-mortem, and it's invariably been helpful, because we've identified things that we know are going to... that sounds too certain. We suspect are going to get in the way, and that means we take steps, right? And that's, that's the... maybe it's not as formal as a checklist, but it is giving you an advantage in that you are preparing for skillful action.

Harry 27:01

Yeah. I love this topic, and I'm glad we're talking about it. We could probably spend hours and hours continuing to explore it. But on that note, I think we've given folks some super practical ways of thinking about it and some tools to, get to a better place.

Jorge 27:17

Yeah. Thank you for bringing this topic, Harry. Keep on trucking.

Harry 27:22

Thanks, man.

Narrator 27:25

Thank you for listening to Traction Heroes with Harry Max and Jorge Arango. Check out the show notes at tractionheroes.com and if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating in Apple's podcasts app. Thanks.