The oil industry leaders/workers/people in the payroll who triggered the BP oil spill disaster, knew the rules, knew what needed to be done, knew what could go wrong. Yet, the disaster happened.
In small scale, in our Viral Safety™ programmes, people say: ‘we know all that, yet we do thinks in a different, unsafe way’.
People in banking who created the Big Crisis and the Small Crisis knew the rules, knew the boundaries, had a code of ethics, a code of conduct. Yet, they did it, they crossed the line.
These two disastrous extremes highlight the difference between the knowing and the behaving.
Companies’ default position to problems is that there is something wrong with the ‘knowing’. When the knowing is the focus, the solution is ‘knowing more’, which equals training.
It would be ludicrous to say that the BP people need re-training. It is ludicrous to expect bankers to go ‘back to training’, yet this is what they are doing in mass, just kidding themselves.
The problem is culture. Cultures are not created by training. Cultures are behavioural fabrics that are created as social phenomenon (Homo Imitans [1])
Training is hardly the solution. On the contrary, it is a distraction and a alibi.
‘Render unto Training the things that are Training, and unto Culture the things that are Behavioural’.
The laws of knowing and behaving are different as night and day. (Viral Change™ [2])