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High-Reliability 1
The Self-Designing High-Reliability Organization:
Aircraft Carrier Flight Operations at Sea
Part 2 of 4
The Paradox of High Turnover
"As soon as you learn 90% of your job, it's time to move on. That's the Navy way."
--
Junior officer
Because of the high turnover rate, a U.S. aircraft carrier will begin its workup
with a large percentage of new hands in the crew, and with a high proportion of
officers new to the ship. The U.S. Navy's tradition of training generalist
officers (which distinguishes it from the other military services) assures that
many of them will also be new to their specific jobs. Furthermore, tours of duty
are not coordinated with ship sailing schedules; hence, the continual
replacement of experienced with "green" personnel, in critical as well as
routine jobs, continues even during periods of actual deployment.
Continual rotation creates the potential for confusion and uncertainty, even in
relatively standardized military organizations. Lewis Sorley has characterized
the effects of constant turnover in other military systems as "turbulence" and
has identified it as the prime source of loss of unit cohesion. 19 A student of
Army institutional practices has remarked that the constant introduction of new
soldiers into a unit just reaching the level of competence needed to perform in
an integrated manner can result in poor evaluations, restarting the training
cycle, and keeping individuals perpetually frustrated by their poor job
performance. 20
Negative effects in the Navy case are similar. It takes time and effort to turn
a collection of men, even men with the common training and common background of
a tightly knit peacetime military service, into a smoothly functioning
operations and management team. SOPs and other formal rules help, but the
organization must learn to function with minimal dependence upon team stability
and personal factors. Even an officer with special aptitude or proficiency at a
specific task may never perform it at sea again. 21 Cumulative learning and
improvement are also achieved slowly and with difficulty, and individual
innovations and gains are often lost to the system before they can be
consolidated. 22
Yet we credit this practice with contributing greatly to the effectiveness of
naval organizations. There are two general reasons for this paradox. First, the
efforts that must be made to ease the resulting strain on the organization seem
to have positive effects that go beyond the problem they directly address. And
second, officers must develop authority and command respect from those senior
enlisted specialists upon whom they depend and from whom they must learn the
specifics of task performance.
The Navy's training cycle is perforce dictated by the schedule of its ships, not
of its personnel. Because of high social costs of long sea-duty tours, the Navy
has long had to deal with such continual turnover--it attempts as best it can to
mitigate the negative effects. Most important is the institutionalization of
continual, cyclic training as part of organizational and individual
expectations. This is designed to bring new people "up to speed" with the
current phase of the operational cycle, thus stabilizing the environment just
before and during deployment; however, this is accomplished at the cost of
pushing the turbulence down into individual units. Although the deployment cycle
clearly distinguishes periods of "training" from those of "operations," it is a
measure of competence and emphasis, not of procedural substance, that applies
primarily to the ship as a unit, not its men as individuals.
The result is a relatively open system that exploits the process of training and
retraining as a means for socialization and acculturation. At any given moment,
all but the most junior of the officers and crew are acting as teacher as well
as trainee. A typical lieutenant commander, for instance, simultaneously tries
to master his present job, train his juniors, and learn about the next job he is
likely to hold. If he has just come aboard, he is also engaged in trying to
master or transfer all the cumulated knowledge about the specifics of task,
ship, and personnel in a time rarely exceeding a few weeks. 23 In addition to
these informal officer-officer and officer-crew interactions, officers and crew
alike are also likely to be engaged in one or more courses of formal study to
master new skills in the interest of career advancement or rating.
As a result, the ship appears to us as one gigantic school, not in the sense of
rote learning, but in the positive sense of a genuine search for acquisition and
improvement of skills. One of the great enemies of high reliability is the usual
"civilian" combination of stability, routinization, and lack of challenge and
variety that predispose an organization to relax vigilance and sink into a
dangerous complacency that can lead to carelessness and error. 24 The shipboard
environment on a carrier is never that stable. Traditional ways of doing things
are both accepted and constantly challenged. Young officers rotate in with new
ideas and approaches; old chiefs remain aboard to argue for tradition and
experience. The resulting dynamic can be the source of some confusion and
uncertainty at times, but at its best leads to a constant scrutiny and
rescrutiny of every detail, even for SOPs.
In general, the Navy has managed to change the rapid personnel turnover to an
advantage through a number of mechanisms that have evolved by trial and error.
SOPs and procedures, for example, are often unusually robust, which in turn
contributes another increment to reliability. The continual movement of people
rapidly diffuses organizational and technical innovation as well as "lessons
learned," often in the form of "sea stories," throughout the organization.
Technical innovation is eagerly sought where it will clearly increase both
reliability and effectiveness, yet resisted when suggested purely for its own
sake. Data is logged with grease pencils by operators who read sophisticated
radar systems; indicators for the cables to arrest multimillion-dollar aircraft
are set and checked mechanically, by hand. Things tend to be done in proven ways
and changed only when some unit has demonstrated and documented an improvement
in the field. The problem for the analyst and for the Navy is the separation of
functional conservatism from pure tradition.
Authority Overlays
"Here I'm responsible for the lives of my gang. In civilian life, I'm the kind of
guy you wouldn't like to meet on a dark street."
--
Deck petty officer
Our team noted with some surprise the adaptability and flexibility of what is,
after all, a military organization in the day-to-day performance of its tasks.
On paper, the ship is formally organized in a steep hierarchy by rank with clear
chains of command, and means to enforce authority far beyond those of any
civilian organization. We supposed it to be run by the book, with a constant
series of formal orders, salutes, and yes-sirs. Often it is, but flight
operations are not conducted that way.
Flight operations and planning are usually conducted as if the organization were
relatively "flat" and collegial. This contributes greatly to the ability to seek
the proper, immediate balance between the drive for safety and reliability and
that for combat effectiveness. Events on the flight deck, for example, can
happen too quickly to allow for appeals through a chain of command. Even the
lowest rating on the deck has not only the authority but the obligation to
suspend flight operations immediately, under the proper circumstances, without
first clearing it with superiors. Although his judgment may later be reviewed or
even criticized, he will not be penalized for being wrong and will often be
publicly congratulated if he is right. 25
Coordinated planning for the next day's air operations requires a series of
involved trade-offs between mission requirements and the demands of training,
flight time, maintenance, ordnance, and aircraft handling. It is largely done by
a process of ongoing and continuing argument and negotiation among personnel
from many units, in person and via phone, which tend to be resolved by direct
order only when the rare impasse develops that requires an appeal to higher
authority. In each negotiation, most officers play a dual role, resisting
excessive demands from others that would compromise the safety or future
performance of their units, while maximizing demands on others for operational
and logistic support.
This does not mean that formal rank and hierarchy are unimportant. In fact, they
are the lubricant that makes the informal processes work. Unlike the situation
in most civilian organizations, relative ranking in the hierarchy is largely
stable and shaped by regular expectations, formal rules, and procedures.
Although fitness reports and promotion review boards are not free of abuses or
paradoxes, the shipboard situation tends to promote cooperative behavior, which
tends to minimize the negative effects of jealousy and direct competition. 26
Although officers of the same rank are competitively rated, each stands to
benefit if joint output is maximized and to suffer if the unit is not performing
well. Thus, we rarely observe such strategies as the hoarding of information or
deliberate undermining of the ability of others to perform their jobs that
characterize so many civilian organizations, particularly in the public sector.
Copyright
©1987 Naval War College Review.
