‘Cultural drift’ is carrying SA to disaster
ONE of the formative images of my youth was the Challenger space disaster, a horrifying mid-air explosion which killed everyone on board.
In the aftermath of the disaster, space agency Nasa asked sociologist Dianne Vaughan to study its root failures – which rules had been violated by Nasa engineers and by whom, so that blame could be apportioned.
Vaughan found instead that no rules had been broken, and that there was no single individual or team to blame. Rather, what was at play was what she called a “cultural drift” and a concept she termed “the normalisation of deviance”.
Vaughan’s research theorised that large errors in organisations are often not to do with any single decision by a leader; but instead are the gradual result of people inside institutions individually making small decisions which stealthily alter the organisation’s concept of normalcy and what is right.
Challenger’s explosion was ultimately caused by a malfunction of its O-rings, the seals which kept pressurised, burning gas safely away from the external fuel tanks.
During months of testing, engineers had repeatedly breached their own strict safety guidelines on these O-rings. Yet they found their superiors doing nothing – because each time it was by such a minute amount, that these individual breaches in themselves seemed trivial and within the bounds of what was classified “acceptable risk”.
Slippages
Over time, though never consciously, the engineers began to anticipate such laxity on their superiors’ part, and allow an ever-increasing number of tiny slippages to occur on top of the existing tiny slippages. No one realised that the definition of what was acceptable and what was not, had quietly begun shifting. Or as Vaughan put it, Nasa had reached a position where “they were not merely acting as if nothing was wrong. They believed it.” Until, of course, 73 seconds into the flight, Challenger crashed over the Atlantic.
“Social normalisation of deviance,” she continued, “means that people within the organisation become so much accustomed to a deviant behaviour that they don’t consider it as deviant. But it is a complex process with some kind of organisational acceptance. The people outside see the situation as deviant, whereas the people inside get accustomed to it and do not.”
Scarcely 100 days into his term, Donald Trump presides over an administration which by most definitions has already committed several breaches of what constitutes acceptable executive behaviour.
From himself being caught out lying on wild claims about his predecessor spying on him, to his administration being caught out lying about seemingly everything else – from secret discussions with Russia through to the size of the inaugural crowd – together with an increasingly wild level of paranoia creeping in, for other administrations such an implosion would result in introspection and hopefully moderation of behaviour.
Yet we have evidenced the opposite in Trump-land.
The Financial Times columnist Gillian Tett has observed “the more the Trump team keeps breaking the rules, the more a certain ‘normalisation of deviance’ occurs. And the more that the Trump team is seen to get away with these breaches, the more people start to assume that it will continue to do so.”
Until, as Vaughn may argue, and as several commentators are predicting, a tipping point is reached and a final catastrophe is unleashed.
A new book by Allan Lichtman, The Case for Impeachment, brazenly – wishfully? – predicts how Congress could topple the US president.
Lichtman is no maverick – he is a respected (and usually sombrely rational) historian who was one of the (very, very) few pollsters to predict a Trump victory in the 2016 elections.
Impeachment is an Everest of endurance for opponents to scale – it requires serious misdemeanours by a president, with a huge onus on applicants to prove. Lichtman admits that it will not occur any time soon, and is unwilling to predict a single reason. But he does pin his badge on it ultimately happening.
Seen another way, Vaughn’s concept of a deviantly normal society, where ever-increasing immoral behaviour is tolerated, can be read as a call for despondency; a Challenger-inspired harbinger of ultimate failure. But can it also be seen as offering a balm of solace?
In recent months, South Africa has had to live with the disappointment of several false dawns when it comes to Jacob Zuma. Pawns in the hands of a master chess player, we’ve had to contend with stillborn hopes and ill-founded predictions of his ultimate demise. And while we’ve been nursing each missed chance, each lost opportunity, he’s presided over a state which keeps breaking boundaries and getting away with it.
Subtle breach upon subtle breach, this contorted band of looters have altered our concept of normalcy till a point has been reached where our society is a kleptocracy; anything but normal.
Yet Vaughn’s thesis offers hope that, uncorrected (and surely the Zuma administration has proved itself incapable of self-correction), eventually some tiny, unheralded flaw will emerge which will widen into a chasm, causing the entire deck of cards to collapse.
Cynics may well enquire as to why it has not happened yet and what more society has to do. Yet we should not easily make light of what it is we are seeking.
The removal of a sitting president in a constitutional democracy like South Africa is neither an easy thing to contemplate nor to achieve, and just like an impeachment process in the US, represents an Everest which can only be scaled with tenacity.
We might not live in either normal nor acceptable times, but the immutable laws of physics – and of Vaughn – suggest that the normalisation of deviation must ultimately lead to reaction and renewal.
The only question is whether it will happen with a whimper or with a bang.
Rajab, a director of the New National Assurance Company, was educated at UCT and Oxford. He writes in his personal capacity about SA, current events, film appreciation and culture.