Compliance – Seldom simple and never easy

You would have to be marooned on Mars not to realize that the United States Air Force has gone through some tough times lately (see previous posts “Crime and Punishment” and “Early Onset Alzheimer’s: The Air Force at 60”), but last month the new USAF leadership gave us a hint on where the effort to turn the tide would begin, and to use an airman’s metaphor, it was a precision guided bomb delivered on target.

The weapon – compliance.

The target – front line operators and maintainers.

In a speech to US Air Force personnel at Joint Air Base Balad (Iraq) in late October, General Norton Schwartz, the new Chief of Staff said "There is one way to do the nuclear mission, and that is the Air Force way. There is one way to do aircraft and missile maintenance, and that is the Air Force way. We collectively need to back a little bit toward something called compliance. We must, as an Air Force ... do the right thing and do the right thing right. That's as simple as it gets."

Simple – maybe, put probably not.

Easy – not a chance.

Compliance has many enemies. Any attempt to oversimplify this cornerstone of performance is doomed to frustration and eventual failure. There is an old military axiom that says “Beginners chat about tactics while professionals ponder logistics.” Translation: It takes a sustained – and sustainable - effort to win a war, and it will take more than a call to arms from the new USAF Chief to make it happen. So what firepower does the Air Force need to bring to bear on this target to make the General Schwartz’s vision a reality? And what can the rest of us learn from their challenge?

Here are two ways to look deeper at the challenge of creating and sustaining a Culture of Compliance in any organization, big or small.

Compliance Prerequisite #1

Leaders and supervisors should comprehend that there are different types of non-compliance, each with a different cause, and therefore a different remedy.

It is vitally important for supervisors and commanders to comprehend the various types of non-compliance, some of which can actually be beneficial to an organization, if they take the time to learn from them. Currently, in our professional discipline courseware, we teach four distinct types of non compliance:

• Routine – frequent and unofficially condoned violations of procedures – everybody’s doin’ it, nobody cares
• Optimizing – people who have discovered truly “better ways” of getting the job done outside the lines
• Situational – “Just this once” type violations based on a unique set of circumstances
• Rogue – People who violate policies and procedures for self-gratification and to feed their egos

Routine violations lead to a dangerous condition known as the Normalization of Deviance. Rogue violations are festering wounds and decay an organization from within. But Optimizing and Situational violations can be used to create new and better processes and procedures. The bottom line is that treating all non-compliance the same points to a lack of understanding of human behavior by leadership, lost trust, and a poor command climate.

Compliance Prerequisite #2 – Compliance in “3D”

While researching my book Flight Discipline, I discovered that cultures of compliance leverage three key areas: (1) Personal and professional discipline (not to be confused with punishment), (2) diligence, and (3) attention to detail.
Greatly simplified, this 3D approach is outlined as follows:

Personal Discipline – Doing the right thing. When General Schwartz directs his airmen to “do the right thing,” this is really an issue of professional ethics – a prerequisite for voluntary compliance. Therefore, we must begin any quest to change the status quo with the understanding that voluntary compliance is not automatic for many in our society, who were brought up to believe that breaking rules is cool, and that everyone does it. Before someone can be expected to do the right thing – they must value “rightness” for its own sake.

Beyond the ethical issues, the next logistical underpinning for compliance is Attention to Detail – thoroughly accomplishing all tasks with concern for all the areas involved, no matter how small, repetitive or routine. The chilling words of Cameron Diaz to Tom Cruise in the final scene of the movie Vanilla Sky make this point clearly. Cruise, lamenting how his near perfect life was destroyed by a single momentary lapse in judgment, asks how “one little thing” could have such enormous consequences. Diaz’s reply, “Don’t you know, there is nothing bigger than the little things,” has a distinct ring of truth for all corners of our lives, personal and professional. (In order to get the full impact of this line, you really need to see the movie!) An obsession with details is a clear indicator of a high reliability organization with a commitment to compliance.

The final “D” in the 3D approach is a deceptively simple word – Diligence – which is the detail work done with concentration and care all the way until the last checklist step is done, the last part stops moving, and the handoff, debrief and paperwork is completed. In the words of Atul Gawande, M.D. in his outstanding book Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, “Diligence seems an easy and minor virtue . . . it is neither. It is both central to performance and fiendishly hard.”

Empowering discipline, detail and diligence at the level of each individual are just starting points for any organization serious about motivating and enabling their people for world class compliance. Next steps should include a scrub of policies and procedures for clarity and relevance, and a hard look at how they are trained and evaluated, as well as developing close-looped quality assurance and supervision.

There is no question that the first shot of this battle for a return to rigorous compliance was on target, and if General Schwartz was serious about this call to arms, his organization will follow up with a warfighter’s relentless pursuit of the objective on all fronts.