A follow up on this post.

A year had passed. All was going well. Everything seemed great! Until…

There was a minor accident. A delivery truck got into a fender bender with another car, and without a seat belt the driver was slightly injured. The driver was, naturally, not happy, and threatened legal action against the company for “providing unsafe working conditions”.

The project team was hastily re-assembled in order to perform a retrospective, to understand “how could this have happened?”, and to provide remediation recommendations to prevent it from happening again.

As luck would have it, our original analyst was still around. Now of course, it’s extremely tempting to dust off the old meeting minutes and notes and proclaim, “I told you so!” But of course, in the corporate world, that doesn’t work. There’s no self-reflection or admittance of faulty decision-making. Instead, the project team performed a deep dive analysis and came up with the following recommendations.

• Drivers were required to take defensive driving courses, with annual re-training. Because of course, if the driver had been driving defensively they would have not gotten into the fender-bender.
• The driver of the other car was sued by the company, and the legal team provided evidence that the collision was their fault, and not the fault of the company driver. The project team tsk-tsk’d that “people don’t know how to drive these days”.
• The project team made several technology recommendations, for advanced collision detection radars and automated emergency braking. Because new and advanced technological innovations can solve modern problems.

The project team issued a detailed report to management. The driver accident was brushed under the rug, no process changes really happened, all the drivers were required to attend a one-day defensive driving course, and the team moved on, satisfied that they had addressed the problem.

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Someday I will author a follow-up to these two blog posts with viable ideas on what do you in this scenario. But to be honest, at the moment I’ve got nothing except to tell you to hold on to your own ethics. Good luck if you’re in this situation.