We’ve been talking about it for a long time... but nothing has happened.
A new employee was reviewing a procedure the department was accustomed to, when he paused at a step that seemed to contradict the written protocol.
He asked his colleague about it, receiving a quick and confident reply: “We’ve been doing it this way for a long time… and nothing happened.” The statement was not a defense of the procedure’s correctness, but rather of something entirely different: that it had been repeated many times without any punishment.
This simple sentence encapsulates a phenomenon studied by American sociologist Diane Vaughan under the term “normalization of deviance,” during her organizational analysis of the Challenger space shuttle disaster. The problem was not that an organization suddenly decided to ignore a risk, but that unusual signals had appeared previously, and flights occurred without catastrophe, gradually shifting perceptions of what constituted a risk and what was acceptable.
Arabs and peoples of the Middle East
This is where one of the most dangerous errors in managerial thinking occurs: confusing the safety of the outcome with the correctness of the practice.
An employee may bypass a procedure ten times without incident, making the eleventh bypass seem more acceptable. A machine may operate with a fault indicator showing, a technical system may continue with a vulnerability, or a team may rely on a single person for a sensitive task. Each day that passes safely adds a certificate of trust to the practice, one it never deserved in the first place.
Humans typically learn from outcomes. If someone does something and no harm occurs, they tend to downplay the risk. With repetition, a more dangerous shift occurs: what began as an exception requiring justification becomes a habit needing no explanation, then transforms into an implicit standard that people defend with the phrase: “This is how we’ve always done it.” This recalls the Quranic verse: “And thus have We made of you a middle nation that you will be witnesses over the people and the Messenger will be a witness over you. And We did not make the qibla which you used to face except that We might make evident who would follow the Messenger from who would turn back on his heels. And indeed, it was difficult except for those whom Allah has guided. And never would Allah have caused you to lose your faith. Indeed, Allah is, to the people, Kind and Merciful.” (Surah Al-Zukhruf, 23). The mere fact that others have previously engaged in a practice does not make it correct.
The problem here is no longer just the error itself, but the institutional memory that has redefined deviation as acceptable.
Therefore, in reviews, it is not enough to ask: “Has this procedure previously caused a problem?” The more important question is: “Is the practice fundamentally correct, and what risk have we stopped seeing simply because we have become accustomed to its presence?”
The solution is not to open the door to doubt regarding every procedure, but to distinguish between three things: what is officially approved, what is a justified exception, and what is a deviation we have grown accustomed to.
If recurring exceptions are not periodically reviewed, an organization may one day wake up to discover that the written rule is one thing, and actual practice is another.
The most dangerous aspect of normalization of deviance is that yesterday’s success may become an argument against today’s review.
Past success does not always prove that the path was correct; it may only mean that the error passed this time as well without exacting its price.
Some errors do not become safer with repetition… we simply become less capable of seeing them.
A Kuwaiti writer
