Last week three news items got my attention.
The U.S. Supreme Court voted to allow the President to divert funds legislated for the Pentagon to fund his wall, and the FAA regulators ignored the lack of safety features on the Boeing 737 Max Jets; while the Boeing risk management people appeared to not understand the potential dangers that allegedly resulted in two crashes of that plane. These three instances are indicative of the serious attention deficit by personnel in the workplace.
The Supreme Court’s decision was not about the issues which seemed like they are important, but that the protagonists challenging the President did not appear to have a legal right to do so. Didn’t they know that before they started? How is it possible that no one understood this early on? This is mind-boggling to me. Pure attention deficit by the many personnel involved.
The problem with the plane is still being unraveled and besides resulting in hundreds of lives lost will cost Boeing billions to figure it out including lost profits from lost sales, but many more billions in lost market value. It seems to me that the added risk management costs would have been minuscule in relation to the huge cost that has resulted.
If these were isolated instances it might not matter that much, except if you were directly or indirectly involved, but it seems these are typical of pervasive actions. They indicate to me a lack of care and attention of those running things or an absence of understanding the damage that could result in further demonstrating the importance of some sort of risk management oversight.
- There are many other occurrences, and I’ve written about some of them previously, but for today these make my point. What is needed are two things.
Each person in a responsible position needs to be more aware of the value and benefits of what they are doing, and the potential for failure and ways to protect against that. - Some additional thought and funds need to be allocated to performance oversight and risk management, including perhaps an audit of procedure specifications and follow through. Otherwise, they will continue to get what they are paying for – attention-deficit personnel.
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