I have noticed that, when I look in the mirror, I seem to be far better looking and in better shape if I am not wearing my glasses. There is no adage like ‘the camera adds 10 pounds’ relating to specs, so I can only assume that they are revealing the truth*.
It feels nice to be deluded by not quite seeing things clearly. It allows you to fill in the image with better things and lets you pretend everything’s going well.
But if everything isn’t going well, it’s not particularly helpful. In fact, can be quite damaging.
We see this all the time in safety (at least we do if our vision is up to it).
When dashboards, reporting and assurance programmes are not well designed and well thought out, we’re not seeing clearly what is happening in the business. And if we’re going to fix things, improve things and generally do our job, we need to. By presenting information that is not probing, insightful and in focus, we’re effectively asking our leaders to take their glasses off before looking at safety performance.
Greg Smith’s work on proving safety and Ben Hutchinson’s research on audit effectiveness both point to significant challenges in this area – see also here and here for discussion on reporting and assurance.
To help keep that vision 20/20, here are some questions to ask in relation to your clarity:
- Are your audits properly considering effectiveness and practicality of systems – not just confirming that they’re written down somewhere?
- Are independent audits complemented by internal assurance (peer reviews, double-checks etc) by people that genuinely understand your organisation and its operations?
- Is your assurance programme rigorously structured and risk based to make sure there is good coverage of issues, as well as a strong focus on the most important of those?
- Are your reporting processes efficient to maximise lines of sight between leaders/governors and real work?
- Is information concise and insightful, avoiding swamping people with unhelpful data?
- Are there easy and effective feedback loops allowing operational experience to be fully visible?
- Do you react constructively to bad news in a way that encourages future reporting?
I still remember the first time I got glasses. I was about 14 years old. Your eyesight tends to deteriorate little by little over time, so it’s easy to not really notice it. But the difference when I first put them on was astonishing. Trees had individual leaves instead of being the green blob of a child’s painting. Car number plates had actual numbers on them (at a distance – I could see them close-up, I’m not quite that short-sighted).
So, build some glasses for your business and get that clarity. You might even get a response like this. Toddler sees the world clearly for the first time with new glasses
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*Apologies for any unpleasant images this may have conjured up**.
**Be grateful you’re not subject to them all the time.