A risk manager I've been coaching told me about a series of shoulder dislocations her field staff dealt with last season. Their first aid protocol said field staff couldn't attempt reductions. Staff had to wait it out, evacuate, and hand it to a clinician.
But, her field staff did it anyway. More than once, they chose to break policy and reduce a dislocation in the field. It was within their scope of training, after all.
She and her leadership team came down hard at first. I can’t blame them. I’m definitely a proponent of having first aid protocols that trump skills covered in a first aid class, and I’m a big fan of following policy…they’re written for a reason.
She described “defensive conversations” with the field leaders. We’ve all seen this movie before: you get called in to explain why whatever you did wasn’t okay. One of her program managers eventually told her, plainly, that the way she’d handled it had made her feel bad.
What she described to me in hindsight was the realization that her staff hadn't been disobeying. They'd been giving her feedback through their behavior. The field staff were closer to the participant, the injury, the evacuation distance, and the actual capability of the team than the protocol was. They were doing their best to manage risk in real time. The leadership team's first response was to blame them, instead of listening to them.
My coachee apologized to her staff. She decided to take these repeated infractions as a signal to review the policy. After seeking input from her medical advisor, she and the risk management committee agreed to change the protocol. Qualified staff can now reduce dislocations in the field.
Legacy risk management in our field focuses on individual instructors’ judgment, decisions, and actions. Under this approach, it’s easy to fall into compliance-based risk management. The switch that’s been underway and will continue as our field matures is towards risk-intelligent learning organizations.
What staff see and do in the field becomes signals and feedback to update practices, policies, and systems. A risk-intelligent, learning organization prioritizes feedback and focuses on improving feedback loops, which in turn improves the context in which staff do their work and exercise their judgment.
What headaches do staff continually create for you? Ask yourself, your advisors, and your staff, what are these headaches telling us about what should change?
Stu
P.S. If you've got a story like my coachee's, where staff were telling you something through their behavior before you knew how to hear it, leave a comment and tell me about it.