Sean Glaze uses the history of the aircraft black box, invented by David Warren, to explain why teams resist new dashboards and surveys. The real problem isn't the tool itself but mistrust about how the data will be used. People need to believe data supports them, not punishes them.
In the Atlanta airport, about to head to a speaking engagement, and I found out something recently about the black box in airplanes that's very interesting. The black box flight recorders were rejected for 6 years, and no one ever said that it didn't work. David Warren was 9 years old when his father boarded a plane and disappeared over the Bass Strait. Nobody ever discovered why. 20 years later, David's actually working in Melbourne helping to investigate a string of crashes involving commercial jet airliners. Same problem, no survivors, no explanation. A room full of very smart people arguing about what might have happened. And Warren keeps thinking the same thing. If people could just hear the last few seconds, the argument would be over. So in 1954, he writes a 4-page memo proposing a crash-protected recorder. His own supervisor doesn't like it. The Civil Aviation Department says it has no immediate direct use. The Air Force says it's going to produce more expletives than explanations. And pilots said it was a snooping device. So So he went ahead and built it himself in his garage on weekends. Now look at the shape of the objections that he got, because you've probably heard every one of them in a meeting. Nobody said it didn't work. They said it wasn't needed, it'd make people look bad, it might feel like surveillance. The device wasn't rejected because of engineering. It was rejected because of who was recording it and how it might be used. Now think about the last survey that you sent out. Think about the people who didn't fill it in. You probably read that as apathy or as people being Too busy. But it's probably neither one. People hesitate on surveys for the same reason that pilots hesitated on the black box. Not because they doubted the instrument, but because they weren't sure how the information was going to be used. Black boxes exist to explain, not to punish. That's the difference between a debrief and an interrogation. Same data, different purpose. Right. And your team knows which one to expect from you. So the more useful question isn't, how do I get people to complete a survey? It's how do I get them to trust me to use the information to support them instead of to punish? This is the United States of America.
