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Came across this exceptional story on the process where organisations, under whatever direction, systematically redefine "what is right or acceptable " to the point that some exceptionally criminal/stupid outcomes happen.
Does this story hit any notes with other posters?
What Was Volkswagen Thinking?
On the origins of corporate evil—and idiocy
Justin Renteria
One day in 1979, James Burke, the chief executive of Johnson & Johnson, summoned more than 20 of his key people into a room, jabbed his finger at an internal document, and proposed destroying it.
The document was hardly incriminating. Entitled “Our Credo,” its plainspoken list of principles—including a higher duty to “mothers, and all others who use our products”—had been a fixture on company walls since 1943. But Burke was worried that managers had come to regard it as something like the Magna Carta: an important historical document, but hardly a tool for modern decision making. “If we’re not going to live by it, let’s tear it off the wall,” Burke told the group, using the weight of his office to force a debate. And that is what he got: a room full of managers debating the role of moral duties in daily business, and then choosing to resuscitate the credo as a living document.
Three years later, after reports emerged of a deadly poisoning of Tylenol capsules in Chicago-area stores, Johnson & Johnson’s reaction became the gold standard of corporate crisis response. But the company’s swift decisions—to remove every bottle of Tylenol capsules from store shelves nationwide, publicly warn people not to consume its product, and take a $100 million loss—weren’t really decisions. They flowed more or less automatically from the signal sent three years earlier. Burke, in fact, was on a plane when news of the poisoning broke. By the time he landed, employees were already ordering Tylenol off store shelves.
On the face of it, you’d be hard-pressed to find an episode less salient to the emissions-cheating scandal at Volkswagen—a company that, by contrast, seems intent on poisoning its own product, name, and future. But although the details behind VW’s installation of “defeat devices” in its vehicles are only beginning to trickle out, the decision process is very likely to resemble a bizarro version of Johnson & Johnson’s, with opposite choices every step of the way.
The sociologist Diane Vaughan coined the phrase the normalization of deviance to describe a cultural drift in which circumstances classified as “not okay” are slowly reclassified as “okay.” In the case of the Challenger space-shuttle disaster—the subject of a landmark study by Vaughan—damage to the crucial O‑rings had been observed after previous shuttle launches. Each observed instance of damage, she found, was followed by a sequence “in which the technical deviation of the [O‑rings] from performance predictions was redefined as an acceptable risk.” Repeated over time, this behavior became routinized into what organizational psychologists call a “script.” Engineers and managers “developed a definition of the situation that allowed them to carry on as if nothing was wrong.” To clarify: They were not merely acting as if nothing was wrong. They believed it, bringing to mind Orwell’s concept of doublethink, the method by which a bureaucracy conceals evil not only from the public but from itself.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/01/what-was-volkswagen-thinking/419127/
Does this story hit any notes with other posters?
What Was Volkswagen Thinking?
On the origins of corporate evil—and idiocy
Justin Renteria
One day in 1979, James Burke, the chief executive of Johnson & Johnson, summoned more than 20 of his key people into a room, jabbed his finger at an internal document, and proposed destroying it.
The document was hardly incriminating. Entitled “Our Credo,” its plainspoken list of principles—including a higher duty to “mothers, and all others who use our products”—had been a fixture on company walls since 1943. But Burke was worried that managers had come to regard it as something like the Magna Carta: an important historical document, but hardly a tool for modern decision making. “If we’re not going to live by it, let’s tear it off the wall,” Burke told the group, using the weight of his office to force a debate. And that is what he got: a room full of managers debating the role of moral duties in daily business, and then choosing to resuscitate the credo as a living document.
Three years later, after reports emerged of a deadly poisoning of Tylenol capsules in Chicago-area stores, Johnson & Johnson’s reaction became the gold standard of corporate crisis response. But the company’s swift decisions—to remove every bottle of Tylenol capsules from store shelves nationwide, publicly warn people not to consume its product, and take a $100 million loss—weren’t really decisions. They flowed more or less automatically from the signal sent three years earlier. Burke, in fact, was on a plane when news of the poisoning broke. By the time he landed, employees were already ordering Tylenol off store shelves.
On the face of it, you’d be hard-pressed to find an episode less salient to the emissions-cheating scandal at Volkswagen—a company that, by contrast, seems intent on poisoning its own product, name, and future. But although the details behind VW’s installation of “defeat devices” in its vehicles are only beginning to trickle out, the decision process is very likely to resemble a bizarro version of Johnson & Johnson’s, with opposite choices every step of the way.
The sociologist Diane Vaughan coined the phrase the normalization of deviance to describe a cultural drift in which circumstances classified as “not okay” are slowly reclassified as “okay.” In the case of the Challenger space-shuttle disaster—the subject of a landmark study by Vaughan—damage to the crucial O‑rings had been observed after previous shuttle launches. Each observed instance of damage, she found, was followed by a sequence “in which the technical deviation of the [O‑rings] from performance predictions was redefined as an acceptable risk.” Repeated over time, this behavior became routinized into what organizational psychologists call a “script.” Engineers and managers “developed a definition of the situation that allowed them to carry on as if nothing was wrong.” To clarify: They were not merely acting as if nothing was wrong. They believed it, bringing to mind Orwell’s concept of doublethink, the method by which a bureaucracy conceals evil not only from the public but from itself.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/01/what-was-volkswagen-thinking/419127/
