Adoption and Adoption

In the incident management software industry we often talk about user adoption. This is a software implementation issue. It deals with user experience, training and rollout. If your employees don’t report incidents the system is useless. Everything can be perfect but without user buy-in nothing else matters.

To be successful at incident management however you also need another form of adoption. When mistakes are detected, the learning opportunities should start flowing throughout the system. This is sometimes called the ‘adoption rate’. Aviation for example, has protocols that enable every airline, pilot and regulator to access every new piece of information in almost real time. Data is universally accessible and rapidly absorbed around the world. The adoption rate is almost instantaneous.

In many other industries the adoption rate is sluggish. The worst example I have heard of is that it took 194 years for the British Navy to enact the scurvy prevention dietary guidelines that Captain James Lancaster figured out in 1601.

What experts like Dan Boorman have recognized is that the reason for the delay is not usually laziness or unwillingness. The reason is more often that the necessary knowledge has not been translated into a simple, usable, and systematic form. If the only thing people did in aviation was issue dense, pages-long bulletins for every new finding that might affect the safe operation of airplanes — well, it would be like subjecting pilots to the same data deluge of almost 700,000 medical journal articles per year that clinicians must contend with. The information would be unmanageable.

Although complexities vary from industry to industry one truth remains. When the probability of error is high, the importance of learning from mistakes is more essential. One cannot necessarily transfer all learnings from one industry to another but you can always transfer attitude.

The best procedures in the world won’t work unless you change attitudes towards error. Until we change the way we think about failure, high performance will remain a mirage.

Adopt and adopt!