In today’s world, companies and organizations face tremendous challenges, pressures, and uncertainty that often leads to poor management decisions. What everyone does or decides to do in the face of uncertainty is what really matters the most. Literally anyone and everyone can make choices under conditions of certainty. That isn’t very difficult. Too much stress and pressure in the workplace will often lead to something known as normalization of deviance. I am referring to deviance as in departing from the norm, performing in a non-standardized way, and divergence from the accepted social norms of behavior. I am also referring to normalization as in to make something normal or to create an established standard or procedure. Put the two together and you come up with normalization of deviance. Normalizing deviance is defined as ‘the gradual process through which unacceptable practice or standards become acceptable. As the deviant behavior is repeated without catastrophic results, it becomes the social norm for the organization.’ The worst attribute of deviance is that it isn’t confined to just a work environment, it can happen literally anywhere and anytime which I believe is one of the main reasons it is able to create so many problems for so many people around the world. Don’t make a mistake and think that just because it is something intangible or just a concept that is it virtually harmless. That couldn’t be further from the truth as it can be very disastrous and even potentially fatal. Normalization of deviance rears its ugly head in all walks of life, but it especially occurs more frequently in the business world. It is extremely prevalent in health care, education, public safety, transportation, and everywhere in between. We even deal with normalization of deviance here locally in the state of Michigan. I would consider Wolverine World Wide’s illegal dumping of toxic waste and the Flint water crisis as an issue of normalizing deviance. In both cases they were completely aware of what was happening and just chose to ignore the problem and hope it went away. Don’t be surprised when ignorance and hope fail to get things done on their own. A wise man once said, ‘hope isn’t a strategy’. The banking crisis during 2008 was a perfect example of normalizing deviance and how it can affect an entire country as well as an entire economy. A few other extremely well recognized incidences of deviance include the Challenger launch, the Costa Concordia capsize, the Isabella Steward Gardener museum theft, the Colombia disaster, and finally the Deepwater Horizon incident. Nearly all of the previously mentioned occurrences resulted in at least some fatalities as well as many injuries. The most important thing to take away from each of these incidents is that all of them could have likely been prevented had people noticed their own deviance. One of the worst things about standardization of deviance is that most of the time you fail to notice it until it is too late. I like to think of it as slowly drifting into failure that you are unable to notice. Despite everything I have already mentioned, normalization of deviance is a major problem facing business’s everywhere, but it is a problem that does in fact have a solution albeit a complex one.
For the most part I completely agree with Brian Strobel’s assumptions about the normalization of deviance, but there were a few minor details that I did disagree with. I wished he would have focused more on the science behind his observations as I feel like pretty much anything is more convincing when you have scientific data to back it up. I didn’t find any of his arguments unbelievable, but it is hard to argue with rationally objective scientific facts. Brian Strobel summarized normalizing deviance in an x and y scenario. He discussed that we are intended to do x, but it’s difficult so people will normally attempt to maneuver around x and decide to perform y instead. When people decide that x is too challenging they will rely on performing y more frequently until y itself becomes the standard procedure. He identified the tree main causes of deviance as rationalizing, our need to be social, and institutionalization. I couldn’t agree more although those are the three simplest causes. Strobel mentioned the most important thing anyone can do to become more self-aware of deviance is to attempt to notice things before it is too late even though it is a challenge. Strobel stated, ‘Noticing things and thinking about what we notice work closely and will likely result in seeing our surrounding differently and will very well change the course of events that we operate within.’ I strongly agree about his idea that most people suffer from perceptual blindness. I am a massive bonsai fanatic and I recently discovered a study that was published on the idea that a large percentage of people are completely ‘plant blind’ for various reasons. It intrigues me that if an animal enters a room with people all eyes will be on the animal, but if there is a plant in the room nobody will even notice it. Ironically if it wasn’t for plants we wouldn’t exist. Plants contribute a ton to human life, yet they pretty much go unnoticed. Since I have read this study I have been especially paying attention to if it has merit or not and I believe it does. I have witnessed people literally walking into plants, bushes, and trees here on campus damaging them and not even noticing. You could confront the person about it and they would literally not even know what you are talking about. I find it fascinating how completely and utterly perceptually blind people can be. People choose to see what they want to see. An aspect I highly disagree with Brian Strobel about is the fact that he mentioned people don’t start out with bad intentions as well as that nobody goes out saying that they are going to do things wrong from the beginning. I vastly disagree. In all aspects of life, I strongly believe people do things with a solely corrupt intention. The very tragic and recent school shooting in Florida is a great example. I highly doubt that young man started out his day with good intentions let alone a single good intention. A few more examples of such instances are 9/11, Columbine, and Sandy Hook school shooting just to name a few. ‘Everyone really needs to become more aware of our surroundings, once we start to notice things we can become aware of things that aren’t right but have yet convinced ourselves that they are actually correct. Once you do that you can take intentional actions to do something about it. Even very small actions will have more effect than no actions at all. We can each do our own part that on our watch deviance does not become normalized.’ Overall, I found his lecture to be intriguing and it provided me with some brilliant insights into deviance.
I have encountered normalizing deviance in my life more times than I can remember. Fortunately for myself as well as my coworkers I have not had any major incidences while at work. However, I have encountered deviance in my personal life more times than I can remember. There have been many times during the span of my life where I have deviated from standard procedures as well as convinced myself it was ok until it was too late. Personally, I dislike occasions where a problem or disaster occurred and then after the incident you finally realize that you could have done something to prevent it. It is a terrible feeling to know you could have done something more. In my mind it is similar to not trying your best, almost as if you didn’t put is as much effort as possible. I personally don’t believe we will ever have a chance at completely eradicating normalizing deviance as people are often weak, lazy, and are more likely to take shortcuts than to just do things the proper way. The only chance we have at stopping deviance is to educate ourselves the best we can to do our part in stopping deviance. I witnessed normalizing deviance pretty much my entire life at my father’s various businesses and I learned via observing it. Even at a young age I was able to see how small mistakes would often compound into large mistakes. It would rarely ever end well. I can’t tell you how many times I have witnessed people lose their jobs or worse from normalizing deviance. A common example I have seen many times were waitresses that would start stealing small amounts from the cash register and violate procedures in place to get away with it temporarily. If they were able to get away with it for a while it would eventually escalate into full-blown theft or fraud and the person would end up losing their job or end up in jail. My father preached to me my entire life to just do things the correct way the first time and avoid the hardship. Procedures, policies, and rules exist for a reason. I personally experienced normalizing deviance while playing golf way too often. It was always a challenge for myself, not because I always took shortcuts but because it is very easy to develop bad habits playing golf. It would typically start with a small harmless bad habit that would go relatively unnoticed until it developed into a fully developed bad habit that was extremely difficult to break. It drove me insane as it was always a huge waste of time. I would spend way too much time attempting to break bad habits rather than working on improving other aspects of my game. I would end up having to completely start over to reteach myself to eliminate the bad habits often unsuccessfully. It didn’t take me long to realize routine and proper procedure weren’t just important in business but in every aspect of life. While playing golf I eventually learned to just do it right or don’t even bother doing it. I also reached out to a friend of mine who was a swing instructor to develop my game further. It wasn’t until I started getting lessons from Jeff that I was able to get past normalizing deviance and developing bad habits. I played golf to be alone and independent, so it took me a while to realize how important affiliation, cooperation, communication, and teamwork were for contesting deviance.