The Bad Apple

A long time ago, a friend of mine in Montana was fired from his job due to a safety violation. It amounted to him totalling a work truck on a state road after he crashed into a retaining wall. The investigation showed that a nail on the road had punctured the tire, and that the tire immediately exploded. This caused "Jim" to lose control of the truck and the truck careened into the wall. Jim was fine but the truck was totalled. The investigation also revealed that Jim was driving 55mph in a 45mph zone and so he was fired. Safety violations, you see, poor judgement.

Recently, this happened again, but this time at a different office.

Tom experienced a near-miss in the mountains, not because of bad judgement, but because of The Hand of God. To be precise, climbers climb in the mountains, rockfall occurs in the mountains, and sometimes there is a convergence between the two. Sometimes climbers are killed, sometimes they survive. It's the nature of climbing. In this case, Tom survived.

Tom belongs to a high functioning, highly reliable team with an impeccable safety record. A great deal of this can be attributed to individual and collective good judgement and, if you will, horizontal and vertical trust within the team. In my experience, it's pretty near impossible to have a team of this caliber without those things.

So the question is this : When Tom is fired after the rockfall incident, do trust and - as a domino effect - good judgement go out the window?

I thought the bad apple theory went out the window years ago.

See you next week -

Drew