Frustration causes accidents.
Ask any country police officer attending messy head-on car demolition derbies. Ask any machine shop supervisor who has to search for the severed fingers from an impetuous young hand so they hopefully can be sewn back on.
Ask any safety officer on a busy minesite about how stupid little on-site oversights can lead to very ugly and even more stupid body mangling. We all experience some hot-headedness when we are prevented from doing how we think best.
Possibly when we are stuck dawdling behind a 4-wheeler pulling the caravan with the dinghy on top. Or when we have to take twice as long to change the tire because the jack handle is missing and the tire iron is the only available make-do handle.
We get angry. We stop thinking calmly and completely. We make hasty ill-considered decisions. Sometimes these poor decisions result in a near-miss; sometimes they result in a disaster. Sometimes we get away with it and nothing really bad happens.
I spend most of my time as a consultant in offices - corporate and government, small and large, across a huge variety of professions and industries.
I am increasingly a witness to accidents. Not physical accidents but human management accidents. Executive carnage. Mangled managers.
It is not only the physical environment of roads, machine shops, industrial sites, and so on, that have accidents caused by frustration. Bad business decisions are being made because of frustration, too.
Inadequate vision and inadequate planning are causing normally competent senior and middle managers to lose their cool.
How can you make clear forward-thinking innovative decisions when your organisation does not know where it is going? When the supposed leaders do not effectively lead.
Ad hoc-ery, knee-jerk reactions, short-term thinking, crisis management, and individual survival tactics are the modus operandi of many managers today.
Understandably. Their seniors are not showing any evidence of knowing what is happening either. Blind leading the blind.
Unilateral decisions are made. Orders are given. Commands must be carried out.
Inevitable frustration occurs within those previously proud and competent executives who are now being told what to do without discussion, without a bigger picture, without any means of making sense of the decisions handed down to them.
Frustration leads to anger, to apathy or insurrection, to low morale, to not caring about the quality or improvement of anything to do with the organisation. The organisation becomes a veritable killing field.
All the rhetoric about quality control, total quality management, continual improvement programmes, and wide consultation is a meaningless mockery. Bad decision making processes lead to bad results - decision accidents that too often lead to disasters.
WA is about to have legislation forcing us to keep to the left on our roads and thereby decreasing the number of accidents caused by frustrated drivers.
Authorities have waited politely for us road-users to learn to do this by ourselves, as has occurred in most other Western countries and Aussie states. We haven't learned. We must be forced to do it.
Is this what we now need for senior government and management in WA to be more forward thinking and planning in their decision making?
If only we could legislate the bad decision makers to the side of the road so more appropriate drivers could pass on by and lead us into an exciting healthy future.
Unfortunately we must wait for these Jurassic business leaders to either learn to change or to fade into extinction. They will be their own final accident.
Business News 24 Nov 1995
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