Defining Drift, and Countering It: Drift into Conversations

[Image courtesy of the U.S. Navy through Flickr via a Creative Commons license]Whether a sailboat, a home (like this one from Japan shown in the Pacific Ocean after a 2011 typhoon), or at a workplace, drift and being adrift can be risky and dangerous – often when it is subtle and not noticeable. For workplace drift, open conversations up and down the chain can help combat the concept of drift.

So, What is Drift Anyway?

Think of a sailboat in the water. When the sails are drawn and there is no wind and there is an anchor with a lot of slack in the chain, the boat will tend to subtly move away from its previous spot. It is the current in the water that leads the boat to go adrift without the wind to propel it in a specific direction.  Drift can be subtle, like in the case of the sailboat. The people on the boat may not feel or even sense that they are adrift, bu if they drift too far – like, if the anchor comes loose from the sandy bottom – from its original position, the ship could find itself right in the middle of a violent tempest that may put at stake the lives of those on the ship.

In the workplace, drift is a concept that can be just as subtle and just as nefarious as that of a drifting sailboat. Drift is what happens at the nexus between the previous perceived  anathemas – meeting quotas while maintaining safety. Every company wants its workers to be as productive as possible, and at the same time these companies continue to preach safety as a top priority. In the process of workers being on the frontline and hearing both things come out of the mouths of their supervisors and managers, some of them will claim to be creative thinkers and innovators by coming up with a “new way” to do something – maybe it’s something as simple as combining two steps into one to save time and thus be more productive.

At full speed of life, the adjustment is small and probably not really that noticeable. It may look to the untrained eye as just an efficient way to do what is expected, and some supervisors at first glance may not even notice it. But if that  change is not noticed, and that person winds up teaching this “new way” to others, then they will take on the new adjustment – and someone else down the road will be “creative” enough to come up with a subtle new way of doing things that again will increase productivity without “compromising” safety.

Until, of course, someone gets hurt.

An Out-of-This-World Example … or Two

If you want a couple of stark case studies about the effect of drift in the workplace, take a look at NASA and its now-defunct space-shuttle program. While it was innovative and brought about a lot of technological advances in our everyday lives and opened us to what was possible for us in space, there were two great examples of the dangers of drift, as shown by the tragic accidents that destroyed the space shuttles Challenger (1986) and Columbia (2004). The Challenger accident was notorious for the high profile of it – the launch being televised nationally and internationally because a teacher was aboard as the first civilian into space – as much as for the simple error that caused the explosion. The shuttle gave way because of leaks in the main fuel tank caused by faulty O-rings. There were several space shuttle missions before this that went off without a hitch, an there were many more after Challenger that went off flawlessly, at least until Columbia.

How could something so simple as an O-ring cause so much tragedy and loss of life? It is a matter of how those things were engineered over the years. As the shuttle missions went on, and NASA was building its fleet from the single Columbia vessel to as many as four and five shuttles at one time, the shuttle missions were becoming more frequent – especially as the concept of the International Space Station was coming to fruition and construction of the facility was taking place thousands of miles above the Earth – engineers and mechanics were often being pressed into getting these shuttles ready for service more quickly than before, and while the safety was a priority for these astronauts riding into space on the back of a liquid gas tank at a few thousand miles per hour, the O-rings were needed more quickly than before, and that usually meant people would stray a little bit from the way things were done in the name of saving some time while putting the rings in place.

How Conversation Helps Counter Drift

As was mentioned before, what makes for effective safety practices in the workplace is more conversation than communication. This means that instructions, concerns, feedback all go up the chain just as easily as they come down. Not only do those who set safety policy need to be explicit and specific in protocols to eliminate “loopholes” or “shortcuts” that lead to drift, but there also should be stringent adherence to the protocols by everyone involved. Much of the accountability can be handled in the field since there are not enough supervisors to watch every worker all the time. Management and supervisors have to have open lines of communication with the field so that workers have the confidence (without fear of reprisal for “blowing the whistle”) to be able to warn supervisors of deviations from the protocol by any worker. Those who would know best what is happening are those who are making things happen, and if supervisors are blind or deaf to those workers who value their safety and the safety of others, they will be condoning drift and may see their overall risk levels go up without even realizing it.

Workers themselves are the best protection against drift, and any safety concerns that a worker has should be heeded, investigated and addressed as quickly as possible. Any drift that is allowed to continue is setting up for a full failure of the safety protocols, which then takes the net out from under the workers who are trying to do their jobs well and safely.

Wanting to do things more efficiently is a natural tendency of humans. So while we don’t want to discourage invention and creative thinking, we do have to be aware of the inventions that are happening and whether they are actually  helping the overall process, or are they adding more unseen risks? Only open conversations, where workers feel like they are being heard by management, and management cares enough to ask questions about how work is being done and why, are vital to ensuring safety in the face of efficiency and innovation.