The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter and Live Better in a Fast World

The RAF is not a paragon of problem-solving. Not every mistake or near miss is reported. Similar cases are not always dealt with in the same manner, which can undermine talk of a ‘just culture’. Some officers remain sceptical about persuading pilots and engineers to accept the virtues of airing all their dirty laundry. Many of the mea culpa columns in Air Clues magazine are still published anonymously. ‘Sorry’ remains a hard word to say in the RAF.

Yet the change is paying off. In the first three years of the new regime, 210 near misses or errors were reported at RAF Coningsby. Of these, 73 triggered an investigation. In each one, steps were taken to make sure the mistake never happened again. ‘Given that we never reported near misses before, that’s a quantum shift, a big leap of faith in people,’ says Brailsford. ‘Instead of putting a plaster over problems, we’re now going deeper and dealing with them at their root. We’re nipping problems in the bud by stopping them before they even happen.’ Other air forces, from Israel to Australia, have taken notice.

Adding the mea culpa to your problem-solving toolbox pays off beyond the military. Take ExxonMobil. After the epic Exxon Valdez oil spill off the coast of Alaska in 1989, the company set out to catch and investigate every screw-up, however small. It walked away from a large drilling project in the Gulf of Mexico because, unlike BP, it decided drilling there was too risky. Safety is now such a part of the corporate DNA that every buffet laid out for company events comes with signs warning not to consume the food after two hours. In its cafeterias, kitchen staff monitor the temperature of their salad dressings.

Every time an error occurs at an ExxonMobil facility, the first instinct of the company is to learn from it, rather than punish those involved. Staff talk about the ‘gift’ of the near miss. Glenn Murray, an employee for nearly three decades, was part of the Valdez clean-up. Today, as head of safety at the company, he believes no blunder is too small to ignore. ‘Every near miss,’ he says, ‘has something to teach us if we just take the time to investigate it.’

Like the RAF and Toyota, ExxonMobil encourages even the most junior employee to speak up when something goes wrong. Not long ago a young engineer new to the company was uneasy about a drilling project in West Africa – so he temporarily closed it down. ‘He shut down a multi-million dollar project because he felt there were potential problems and we needed to pause and think it all through, and management backed him,’ says Murray. ‘We even had him stand up at an event and named him Employee of the Quarter.’ By every yardstick, Exxon now has an enviable safety record in the oil industry.

Mistakes can also be a gift when dealing with consumers. Four out of every five products launched perish within the first year, and the best companies learn from their flops. The Newton MessagePad, the Pippin and the Macintosh Portable all bombed for Apple yet helped pave the way for winners like the iPad.

Even in the cut-throat world of brand management, where the slightest misstep can send customers stampeding for the exit and hobble the mightiest firm, owning up to mistakes can deliver a competitive edge. In 2009, with sales tanking in the United States, Domino’s Pizza invited customers to deliver their verdict on its food. The feedback was stinging. ‘Worst excuse for a pizza I’ve ever tasted,’ said one member of the public. ‘Totally devoid of flavour,’ said another. Many customers compared the company’s pizza crust to cardboard.

Rather than sulk, or sit on the results, Domino’s issued a full-blown mea culpa. In documentary-style television commercials, Patrick Doyle, the company’s CEO, admitted the chain had lost its way in the kitchen and promised to deliver better pizzas in the future. Domino’s then went back to the drawing board, giving its pies a complete makeover with new dough, sauce and cheese.

Its Pizza Turnaround campaign worked a treat. Year-on-year sales surged 14.3 per cent, the biggest jump in the history of the fast-food industry. Two years after the apology the company’s stock price was up 233 per cent. Of course, the new pizza recipes helped, but the starting-point was Domino’s doing what RAF air crews and Exxon employees are now expected to do as a matter of course: acknowledging the error of its ways. This allowed the firm to learn exactly where it was going wrong so it could fix it. It also cleared the air. These days, so many companies trumpet ‘new and improved’ products that the net effect is a whirlwind of white noise that leaves consumers cold. The very act of owning up to its mistakes allowed Domino’s to cut through the din and reboot its relationship with customers.

PR experts agree that the best way for a company to handle a mistake is to apologise and explain what it will do to put things right. This accords with my own experience. The other day a payment into my bank account went astray. After 20 minutes of evasion from the call centre, my voice began to rise as my blood reached boiling point. And then a manager came on the line and said: ‘Mr Honoré, I’m very sorry. We made a mistake with this payment.’ As she explained how the money would be retrieved, my fury drained away and we ended up bantering about the weather and our summer holidays.

Public apologies can have a similarly soothing effect. When a customer filmed a FedEx driver tossing a package containing a computer monitor over a six-foot fence in the run-up to Christmas 2011, the video went viral and threatened to annihilate sales during the busiest time of year. Rather than stonewall, though, the company apologised right away. In a blog post entitled ‘Absolutely, Positively Unacceptable’, FedEx’s senior vice-president for US operations announced he was ‘upset, embarrassed, and very sorry’ for the episode. The company also gave the customer a new monitor and disciplined the driver. As a result, FedEx weathered the storm.

Even when we squander other people’s money, owning up in order to learn from the error is often the best policy. In 2011, Engineers Without Borders (EWB) Canada set up a website called AdmittingFailure.com, where aid workers can post their mistakes as cautionary tales. ‘Opening up like that is completely the opposite of the norm in the sector, so it was a huge risk,’ says Ashley Good, Venture Leader at EWB. But it paid off. No longer afraid of being pilloried for messing up, EWB staff became more willing to take the sort of risks that are often the stepping stone to creative breakthroughs. ‘People now feel they have the freedom to experiment, push themselves, take chances because they know they won’t be blamed if they don’t get it right on the first try,’ says Good. ‘And when you push boundaries like that, you get more creative solutions to problems.’ One example: after much trial and error, EWB has devised a system that improves water and sanitation services in Malawi by mobilising district governments, the private sector and communities all at the same time. Workers from across the development sector now post their own stories on AdmittingFailure.com. EWB’s donors love the new regime, too. Instead of dashing for the exit, they welcomed the eagerness to learn from mistakes. Says Good: ‘We’ve found that being open and honest actually builds a stronger bond and higher trust with our donors.’

The same holds true in personal relationships. A first step towards rebuilding bridges after falling out with a partner, friend, parent or child is for all parties to take their share of the blame. Admitting mistakes can ease the guilt and shame gnawing at the wrongdoer and help the victim overcome the anger that often stands in the way of forgiveness. Marianne Bertrand sees the magic of the mea culpa every week in her job as a family therapist in Paris. ‘Many people sit in my office and cannot even begin to address their problems because they are stuck in the rage and resentment for what went wrong,’ she says. ‘But when they finally accept and apologise sincerely for their mistakes, and hear the other person doing the same, you can really feel the atmosphere in the room change, the tension subside, and then we can start working on reconciliation.’

Even doctors are warming to the mea culpa. Study after study shows that what many patients want after being the victim of a medical mistake is not a lump sum payment or the physician’s head on a plate. What they really crave is what FedEx delivered in the wake of that package-tossing incident: a sincere apology, a full explanation of how the error occurred and a clear plan to ensure the same thing will not happen again. Among patients who file a suit for medical malpractice in the United States, nearly 40 per cent say they might not have done so had the attending physician explained and apologised for the mishap. The trouble is, many in the medical profession are too proud or too scared to say sorry.

Those that do so reap the benefits. In the late 1980s the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Lexington, Kentucky became the first hospital in the United States to tap the power of the mea culpa. It informs patients and their families when any member of staff makes a mistake that causes harm, even if the victims are unaware of the error. If the attending physician is found to be at fault, he or she must deliver a clear, compassionate apology to the patient. The hospital also explains the steps it will take to ensure that the error does not happen again, and may offer some form of restitution. But the cornerstone of the new regime is the simple act of saying sorry. This scores well with patients and their families. ‘We believe we spend much less time and money on malpractice lawsuits these days as a result,’ says Joseph Pellecchia, the hospital’s Chief of Staff.

Apologising also helps deliver better healthcare. When medical workers can deal openly with the emotional fallout that comes from making a mistake, they are less stressed and more able to learn from their errors. ‘Physicians are not gods, they are human beings, and that means they make mistakes,’ says Pellecchia. ‘There’s been an incredible change here where we’ve gone from a punitive environment to a learning environment where a physician can ask, “What happened here?” “What went wrong?” “Was it a systems problem?” “Was it me?” – and learn from their mistakes to deliver better care.’ Other hospitals around the world have followed suit. In the same vein, state and provincial governments across the US and Canada have enacted what are known as ‘sorry laws’, which bar litigants from using a physician’s apology as proof of guilt. Everywhere the net effect is the same: happier doctors, happier patients and less litigation.

The truth is that any Slow Fix worthy of the name usually starts with a mea culpa. Whether at work or in relationships, most of us tend to drift along pretending that all is well – remember the status-quo bias and the legacy problem. Admitting there is a problem, and accepting our share of the blame, can jolt us out of that rut. In the Twelve-Step Programme invented by Alcoholic Anonymous and now used in the battle against many other addictions, Step 1 is to admit you have lost control of your own behaviour. ‘Hello, my name is Carl, and I am addicted to the quick fix.’

To overcome our natural aversion to admitting mistakes, especially in the workplace, removing the stick of punishment is often just the first step. It also helps to dangle a carrot to encourage or even reward us for owning up. Remember the Employee of the Quarter accolade bestowed on that young engineer at ExxonMobil. As well as Flight Safety Awards, the RAF pays a cash bonus to anyone who highlights an error that later saves the Air Force money. In the aid world, organisations can win Brilliant Failure Awards for sharing mistakes made in development projects. At SurePayroll, an online payroll company, staff nominate themselves for a Best New Mistakes competition. At a light-hearted annual meeting, they listen to tales of colleagues messing up and what everyone can learn from their blunders. Those who own up to the most useful mistakes win a cash prize.

Even in education, where botching a single question on an exam paper can torpedo your chances of attending a top-tier university, moves are afoot to reward students for embracing mistakes. Worried that its high-achieving pupils had lost their appetite for taking intellectual risks, a top London girls’ school held a Failure Week in 2012. With the help of teachers and parents, and through assemblies, tutorials and other activities, students at Wimbledon High explored the benefits of being wrong. ‘Successful people learn from failure, pick themselves up and move on,’ says Heather Hanbury, the headmistress. ‘Something going wrong may even have been the best thing that could have happened to them in the long run – in sparking creativity, for instance – even if it felt like a disaster at the time.’ Failure Week has altered the atmosphere in the school. Instead of mollycoddling pupils, teachers feel more comfortable telling them point-blank when they have given a wrong answer, thus making it easier to search for a better one. The girls are taking greater risks, too, pursuing more daring lines of inquiry in the classroom and entering creative writing competitions in larger numbers. Members of the school debating club are deploying more adventurous arguments and winning more competitions. ‘Maybe the most important thing the Week gave us is a language to talk about failure as something not to avoid but as an essential part of learning, improving and solving problems,’ says Hanbury. ‘If one girl is upset by a poor mark, another might now make a friendly joke about it or say something like, “OK, you failed, but what can you learn from it?”’

Most workplaces are in dire need of a similar cultural shift. Think of all the lessons that go unlearned, all the problems left to fester, all the bad feelings churned up, all the time, energy and money wasted, thanks to the human instinct to cover up mistakes. Now think of how much more efficient – not to mention agreeable – your workplace would be if every error could be a spur to working smarter. Instead of muddling along, you could revolutionise your office or factory from the bottom up.

There are steps we can all take to harness the mea culpa and learn from our mistakes. Schedule a daily Clinton moment when you say, ‘I was wrong’ – and then find out why. When you mess up at work, pinpoint one or two lessons to be gleaned from the mishap and then quickly own up. When others mess up, quell the temptation to scoff or gloat and instead help them to spot the silver lining. Start a conversation in your company, school or family about how admitting mistakes can inspire creative leaps. Reinforce that message by using feel-good terms such as ‘gift’ or ‘bonus’ to describe the uncovering of helpful errors and by pinning up quotes such as this from Henry T. Ford: ‘Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.’

It also helps to create a shared space, such as a web forum or a suggestions book, for airing mistakes. Borrowing an idea from Toyota, Patounas has put up a Communications Board in his squadron headquarters where any crew member can call attention to a problem – and every case is promptly investigated and addressed. ‘It’s very popular already and you see the engineers and pilots gathered round it,’ says Patounas. ‘It’s tangible and something you can put your arms round.’

It certainly helps to know that our errors seldom look as bad to others as we imagine. We have a natural tendency to overestimate how much people notice or care about our gaffes. Psychologists call this the ‘spotlight effect’. You may feel mortified to discover you attended a big meeting with laddered tights or egg on your tie, but the chances are hardly anyone else noticed. In one study at Cornell University, students were asked to walk into a room wearing a Barry Manilow T-shirt, a social kiss of death for any self-respecting hipster. While the subjects nearly died of embarrassment, only 23 per cent of the people in the room even clocked the cheesy crooner.

If owning up to a mistake is seldom as bad as we fear, however, it is only the first step towards a Slow Fix. The next is taking the time to work out exactly how and why we erred in the first place.

CHAPTER THREE

THINK HARD: Reculer Pour Mieux Sauter

Don’t just do something, stand there.

White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland (Disney version)

If asked to design an office that could make staff look forward to Monday morning, you might come up with something like the headquarters of Norsafe. Every window looks onto a snapshot of bucolic bliss. Clapboard houses nestle in the forest, small boats bob alongside wooden piers, gulls float across a clear sky. In the late morning, the sunshine turns this narrow waterway in southern Norway into a strip of shimmering silver.

For many years the company’s balance sheet looked similarly idyllic. Norsafe has been building boats since 1903 in a country where boating is a serious business. With more coastline than the United States, this long, slender nation on the northern edge of Europe has always looked to the sea. Even today, one in seven Norwegians owns some sort of watercraft. But looks can be deceiving. Not so long ago Norsafe was a firm on the verge of a nervous breakdown, where nobody looked forward to coming in to work on Monday morning.

The company manufactures highly specialised lifeboats for oil rigs and supertankers. Enclosed like a submarine, and painted a vivid, regulation orange, they can drop into the sea, with a full load of passengers, from a height of nearly 40 metres. In the mid-2000s, as the global economy boomed, orders flooded in from around the world, tripling Norsafe’s turnover. Yet behind the top line numbers, the firm, like Toyota, had lost control of its inner workings and was struggling to keep up. Deadlines slipped, design faults passed unnoticed through the production plant, customer complaints went unanswered. With lawsuits piling up and profits plunging, the design, manufacturing and sales teams were at each other’s throats. Everyone knew there was a problem, but no one knew how to fix it.

The turning point came in 2009, when an organisational consultant named Geir Berthelsen delivered a pitch at the Norsafe headquarters. With his shaven head and watchful eyes, the 48-year-old Norwegian exudes the calm of a Zen monk. Since the early 1990s his consultancy firm, Magma, has been mending broken companies around the world with his version of the Slow Fix. Whatever the country or industry, the first step in his recovery plan is always the same: take time to work out the real reason things are going wrong. ‘Most companies are in a hurry, so they just firefight with quick fixes that only address the symptoms instead of the problem itself,’ he says. ‘To identify what is really going wrong, you first have to get a full picture of a company in slow motion, you have to do like Toyota and ask why, why and why, you have to slow down long enough to analyse and understand.’

That is a neat summary of the next ingredient of the Slow Fix: taking the time to think hard about the problem to arrive at the right diagnosis. When asked what he would do if given one hour to save the world, Albert Einstein answered: ‘I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution.’ Most of us do the exact opposite. Think of your last visit to the GP. Chances are the appointment lasted no more than a few minutes and you struggled to say everything you wanted to. One study found that doctors let patients explain their complaint for 23 seconds before interrupting. Is it any wonder so many illnesses are misdiagnosed?

By the same token, you seldom uncover the real reason an organisation is failing by reading an email, convening a meeting or skimming the annual report. When things go wrong, as we saw earlier, people usually shift blame and shy away from saying anything that might cause them to lose face or hurt their colleagues’ feelings. In a world that prizes action over reflection, and when the clock is ticking, it takes nerve to spend 55 minutes thinking. Yet, from business to medicine to everything in between, a little inaction can be just what the doctor ordered. Some problems are no more than a bit of passing turbulence, or a red herring. Others will find their own solution if left alone. But even for problems needing intervention, inaction combined with deep thought and shrewd observation can be the first step to a smart fix. That is why doctors treating unusual conditions will often spend days, weeks, even months running tests, watching how the symptoms evolve, ordering more analysis, before finally arriving at a diagnosis and starting treatment. ‘To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world,’ said Oscar Wilde, ‘the most difficult and the most intellectual.’

That is why the Magma consultancy firm spends a long time in the trenches, working alongside employees, watching, listening, learning, gaining trust, reading between the lines. ‘We always start at the bottom, on the factory floor or wherever the work is done, and live there as long as it takes to understand everything about how all the systems operate and how all the people act within those systems,’ says Berthelsen. ‘We have to discover the right questions before we can figure out the right answers. Only then can we really fix things.’

After a lengthy tour of duty, the Magma team pinpointed why Norsafe was floundering: it had become a big company that still operated like a small one. As orders had grown more complex, staff had stopped paying attention to the details – a fatal mistake when the most sophisticated lifeboats contain 1,500 parts and are subject to a thicket of rules and regulations. The designers would churn out drawings with scant regard for budgets or the laws of physics. The sales team would green-light jobs without fully understanding the small print. Housed in a separate building beside the headquarters, the manufacturing side of the business scrambled to make ends meet. As recriminations flew, the company degenerated into a rabble of rival fiefdoms. ‘We used to struggle to get Sales to show us their upcoming orders or to get any information out of them at all, and no one could break the peaceful silence of the Design people over in their own corner,’ says Geir Skaala, the owner and CEO. ‘I used to feel like I was the only one in the Head Office who took any interest in what was going on in Production.’

After doing its homework, Magma devised a system that would allow Norsafe to operate like a big company. The first step was to set aside more time for vetting contracts. The sales team now goes through every order with a fine-toothed comb, and Skaala reads every contract himself, marking points he disagrees with in red and those that need clarifying in yellow. Each design drawing now comes with a complete list of all the relevant specifications. Everyone’s role in the business has been clearly defined, with staff keeping regular action logs.

Magma also started breaking down the barriers between departments. Employees from design, sales and production now meet regularly, with their phones switched off, to talk about contracts, new plans and what is happening in the factory. Like crews at RAF Coningsby and staff at ExxonMobil, everyone is urged to report even the smallest problems and propose solutions. To reinforce the new spirit of openness, Skaala started eating lunch in the canteen rather than alone in his office.

This Slow Fix did not happen overnight, or without pain. It involved months of explaining, hand-holding and retraining. Egos were bruised and friendships tested. Though dismayed by the status quo, many employees found it hard to embrace the new way of working. ‘They felt, “This is how I do it, how my father did it, how my grandfather did it, why should I change?”’ says Skaala. ‘It wasn’t ill will; it’s just that it’s easier to carry on as before.’ The status-quo bias, in other words. But eventually most Norsafe employees embraced the new regime, and the two who did not left.

Staff seem pleased with the change. Hans Petter Hermansen has been the production manager at Norsafe for more than 20 years. With his deep tan, white hair and piercing blue eyes, he looks like a cross between Giorgio Armani and the hero of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. ‘Magma have taught us to complain, even to stop production, if something is wrong in an order instead of just trying to make it work,’ he says. ‘Now we all talk and work together as a team, which means we actually do things right the first time, which is way more efficient than fixing mistakes farther down the line.’