I thought it might be useful to give an example of when normalisation of deviance is functional. Let’s suppose that a hospital has to treat patients, but because of short-staffing there would be no way of filling out all of the paperwork properly whilst treating all the patients, so the doctors don’t fill out all of the fields.
It’s also important to mention the possibility of scapegoating—perhaps the deviance is justified and practically everyone is working in that manner, but if something goes wrong you may be blamed anyway. So it’s very important to take this small chance of an extremely harsh punishment into account.
Interestingly, I think this could also be an example of normalization of deviance being adaptive proving that it’s a problem. For example, let’s suppose that by failing to fill out all the paperwork something bad happens, so bad that someone bothers to investigate the causes (maybe not on the order of the Challenger explosion but more than a typical postmortem), and they would (hopefully) identify normalization of deviance as part of the reason for the bad thing happening, although hopefully they won’t stop there and notice that short staffing caused the normalization of deviance and not something else. This points, in my mind, to one of the tricky things about normalization of deviance in real organizations: it, like anything, can be used to rationalize whatever outcome is politically expedient, such that even if it’s happening, it might not be an ultimate cause, but acting as if it’s an ultimate cause might allow shifting the blame around to a more convenient location.
I think this has obvious implications if you are thinking about normalization of deviance in broader contexts, including normalization of deviance within a single person.
As long as you remain explicitly aware of the difference between emergency medicine and normal operations. If the hospital is just understaffed compared to their case load, then by accepting that situation and not following accepted practices, they need to realize that they are accepting the trade-off to treat more patients at a lower standard of care.
And the analogy to software teams is clear. If you accept the declaration of an emergency for your development team, and you don’t clearly go back to normal operation when it’s done, then you are accepting the erosion of standards.
I thought it might be useful to give an example of when normalisation of deviance is functional. Let’s suppose that a hospital has to treat patients, but because of short-staffing there would be no way of filling out all of the paperwork properly whilst treating all the patients, so the doctors don’t fill out all of the fields.
It’s also important to mention the possibility of scapegoating—perhaps the deviance is justified and practically everyone is working in that manner, but if something goes wrong you may be blamed anyway. So it’s very important to take this small chance of an extremely harsh punishment into account.
Interestingly, I think this could also be an example of normalization of deviance being adaptive proving that it’s a problem. For example, let’s suppose that by failing to fill out all the paperwork something bad happens, so bad that someone bothers to investigate the causes (maybe not on the order of the Challenger explosion but more than a typical postmortem), and they would (hopefully) identify normalization of deviance as part of the reason for the bad thing happening, although hopefully they won’t stop there and notice that short staffing caused the normalization of deviance and not something else. This points, in my mind, to one of the tricky things about normalization of deviance in real organizations: it, like anything, can be used to rationalize whatever outcome is politically expedient, such that even if it’s happening, it might not be an ultimate cause, but acting as if it’s an ultimate cause might allow shifting the blame around to a more convenient location.
I think this has obvious implications if you are thinking about normalization of deviance in broader contexts, including normalization of deviance within a single person.
As long as you remain explicitly aware of the difference between emergency medicine and normal operations. If the hospital is just understaffed compared to their case load, then by accepting that situation and not following accepted practices, they need to realize that they are accepting the trade-off to treat more patients at a lower standard of care.
And the analogy to software teams is clear. If you accept the declaration of an emergency for your development team, and you don’t clearly go back to normal operation when it’s done, then you are accepting the erosion of standards.