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1. One might say that you're an expert
in danger.
Well, my work is centered on a combination of issues of safety management,
organizational learning, and cultural issues in high hazard industries.
Chemical or nuclear power plants, for example. The kinds of learning
practices that occur in these industries are different from other
industries. Trial and error in a nuclear power plant just doesn’t
work. It's crucial to anticipate what can go wrong, to identify
precursors to problems, to jump on the little problems before they become
big ones. The organizational practices and skills that are standard for
any organization — being attentive, communicating, paying attention
to mistakes — are a life and death matter in this kind of
environment.
2. Do workers in these environments become
immune to risk?
The space shuttle Columbia is a good illustration of this. If you asked
a lot of the experts, they’d tell you that space travel is a very
high-risk venture, but there is a temptation, when there haven’t
been any recent disasters, to think, ’It's just like driving
a car.’ It isn’t. The same risks exist in chemical plants,
medical environments, and nuclear power. We’ve learned that nuclear
power is a very risky operation. Quite a number of plants have discovered
problems — serious problems — especially in the last two years.
The lessons that get learned from these problems are relatively narrow.
It's turning out this way for the Iraq war. We were guilty of
overreaching. There's a temptation to say when we succeed,
’Boy are we brilliant,’ and be blind to the risks.
3. How are you helping to lessen the level of
risk in these environments?
I work on self-analysis and self-improvement in organizational learning
in nuclear power, chemical plants, and in hospitals, on both the
doctors’ side and on the nursing side. Health care is a
complicated system and we're hoping to help the people in that
system who are trying hard to make improvements and to see more ways
forward. In nuclear power plants, of course, the safety issue is
crucial. There is no question that over the course of the last 15 years,
safety has improved dramatically — a result of a huge effort on the
part of industry and government. Unfortunately, the international
collaborations that existed have been scaled back in the last couple of
years. It's an open question about whether that's made these
industries less safe or whether it's a proper balance of
resources. After all, you can spend an infinite amount of money on
safety, but no matter how much you spend, there's still risk. At
what point do you say ’that's enough?’
4. Your research on risky decision-making has
been incorporated into the curriculum. Can you give an example of what
students should think about when faced with real decisions involving
risk?
A good example is the inoculation of first responders to small pox. Sadly,
there have been deaths. If you vaccinate, though, there will be some cost
to human life. But it's an interesting thing about human nature
— people are willing to accept errors of omission but not errors of
commission. There is a sense that it would be better if lives were lost
as a result of not inoculating than if they were lost as a result of
inoculating. People don’t look at the lives saved from
vaccination. This mindset has to be figured into the mix when evaluating
the problems associated with risk
5. How did you end up in the business of risk
— or, rather, the business of averting risk?
I started out in social psychology and social cognition, then did work
in the criminal justice system. Around 1990, a professor from nuclear
engineering started talking to me about a large-scale project he was
organizing on efforts to improve safety in the worldwide nuclear power
industry. He thought that a project of this magnitude was more than just
an engineering project. It had to involve management policy and other
disciplines.
6. Interdisciplinary work seems to be the wave
of the future.
Definitely. You can’t do engineering solely by creating
technology. You have to appreciate and work with the human side: who
will use it, who will build it, how will it influence organizations? So
they need to bring in another batch of scientists and economists to
address these issues. That's what ‘interdisciplinary’
is all about. We're learning to let the problems guide us to which
experts from which disciplines need to be involved in the solution. The
world presents problems that present opportunities for innovation —
innovation is not just fixing things that go wrong.
7. What is the burning issue that everybody
should be thinking about right now?
Leadership. And leadership is now a key element of the MIT Sloan
curriculum. Of course, we can’t put everything it's
necessary to know about leadership into a set of course requirements.
It's important to learn leadership by doing . . . to have the
benefit of structure, but to learn experientially. We're building
a new leadership program that rests on our commitment to leadership as
an educational principle. But to fulfill its mission we have to
demonstrate leadership as well as teach it. At MIT, the idea is to get
the knowledge out there to change the world. MIT is in a position to
generate that knowledge. I think we see our role as a world resource, a
knowledge producer for the world. We don’t think about giving away
our competitive advantage. Part of the mission of our teaching programs
is to increase the sum total of human knowledge.
8. What about innovation? Where does
innovation fit into this larger picture?
Sloan is a great place for innovation in a lot of domains —
innovation in teaching, for example, and innovation in research. MIT
Sloan research is changing the world. As an international institution,
MIT partners with business and industry in remarkable ways, ways that
most other universities do not.
We have to produce a curriculum to answer varied expectations. The MBA students are preparing to get into a business environment and need to be effective right away. The tension arises between offering standard practice and cutting-edge research. We have to illustrate the reality — that if an employee follows the cutting edge, he or she might either be promoted to CEO or fired. We need to balance expectations about innovation and the realities of the present business world.
9.What do you like most about MIT Sloan
students?
The students are an exciting mix, from a wide variety of backgrounds,
countries, and cultures. I see a tremendous drive among students wanting
to bring productive change back to the countries they're from.
They want to go back and help their countries’ economies. They
want to — and they do — make a difference. There are a lot of
activities on campus that give the students the opportunity to give
back, the
Socially
Responsible Business Club, for example. These are win-win
opportunities. They are building skills and helping people. Thinking
about societal good gives students a more balanced perspective.
10. And of course societal good is a
“real world” issue, and MIT is nothing if not “real
world.”
At MIT, we are working with real problems as well as with theory. At an
engineering school you build theory by solving problems. That spirit is
pervasive throughout MIT. MIT Sloan, as a business school, has the same
ethic. Theory is linked to world problems. Because there are so many
innovative people dealing with new challenges and rapid change, the
world of practice often leads the world of theory. There are great
opportunities to develop theory while finding opportunities for new
products, new business concepts, new ways of leading people, and new
ways of linking business, government, and society. The
MIT $100K
competition is a good example of this.
© 2009 MIT SLOAN SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT