For decades there was an aircraft company was known for safety and engineering excellence above all things. They made some of the best, most reliable aircraft in the world. Their market share grew and grew as they became the preferred aircraft of airlines all around the world, largely because of their focus on safety. We’re going to call this company “The Aircraft Company” (TAC)¹.

In 1986, a new CEO was appointed at TAC, and he started receiving, and then applying, pressure to make TAC more lucrative for its shareholders. The new CEO looked over the books, and saw that TAC spent way more time and money than other companies he had led on product development and quality assurance. This CEO wanted to up shareholder value by applying principles of value-based management, which pushed the company to start cutting “inefficiencies” and focusing on growing profits. 

Over a decade, the culture at the company drifted. Instead of obsessive focus on safety and excellence, there became a bit more emphasis on deadlines and costs. Engineering problems became focused on what the competition was doing, not on what the engineers thought were the needed improvements. Those who spoke up about issues that would have once meant months of additional tweaks and tests were asked ‘is it really worth all that hassle and money? Or, We could look at it again, but we would be behind schedule. Or, I’m sure it’s just a one-time problem.  

The rank-and-file employees got the message: the schedule and the budget are what matters most. This all came to a peak during the construction of the a new plane, when a large digital clock with a countdown to the plane’s scheduled first test flight was installed in the big conference room at TAC’s Washington facility. This drift was framed to some as a temporary necessary evil, that they were facing stiff competition from Airbus, but once they got the the new plane out, things could return to normal. But when organizational culture hollows out like that, it’s desperately difficult to take it back to where it was. 

The story feels familiar. When I was in my early 20s, I started working at a church, and I immediately noticed something concerning happening in another team.

I cautiously broached it with a boss, and it was brushed off, “Oh, it’s been that way for decades, don’t worry about that.” So I didn’t. No one else seemed concerned about it, so I figured I was just too young and inexperienced to know that this was all totally normal. I let it go, and eventually I stopped noticing it at all.  When I on-boarded new staff, and a few of them asked, I repeated the same thing I had been taught – don’t worry about that. 

Maybe five years after I started working there, the church got a new director of operations. He was a kind, conscientious man with decades of corporate work experience. A few months into his tenure, he called me into his office, and mentioned what had been happening in this other team. I nodded. He looked dumb-struck and asked,

“Did you know about this?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?” 

“I’m sorry, I just – I thought it was ok.”

But, of course, I didn’t think it was ok. I had known from the beginning that it wasn’t ok, I just had learned not to say anything about it. It wasn’t like anyone had threatened my job, or intimidated me into silence, I just had gotten the message that speaking up (or as it was phrased there – ‘inserting myself’) wasn’t how things were done. 

I felt ashamed. I still feel a little ashamed about it. I didn’t trust my gut. There were real consequences because of all of our collective negligence. But this isn’t to shame that church, or even TAC, this is not about a specific bad organization or bad people, it’s about the way any of us, and all of us, can drift off of our own values without even realizing it, particularly when we feel threatened or anxious. 

The consequences that TAC faced were devastating. An engineering flaw that could cause their new plane to stall and fall out of the sky was discovered fairly late in production. Because redesigning the actual plane would have put them behind and over budget, they opted for installing a piece of existing software, that could counteract the stall by taking control of the plane itself. The software, designed for military aircraft, wasn’t a perfect fit, and so it had to be tweaked to have fewer safety measures to work on the new plane. Those safety measures were meant to keep the software from taking over the plane when it was functioning normally. Before production, TAC had promised some of its customers that their pilots would not have to do any additional training to fly the plane, so they buried any mention of the software in the manual, and didn’t even tell pilots it was on the plane. 

Faulty activation of the software (a known risk) caused the crashes of two passenger jets in 5 months, killing hundreds of people. The plane was grounded for more than a year while FAA investigators tried to understand what happened. Millions of pages of discovery about TAC tell the story of an organization whose culture has made it so those who speak up about problems are not heard, and the schedule matters more than safety. Billions in fines later, we would hope things at TAC would have been permanently changed, but earlier this year, an “improved” version of their new plane took off from Portland, Oregon, only to hav²e a piece of the fuselage fly clean off the plane soon after take-off.  The problem? Inadequate quality control at TAC. Clearly the work of turning around a culture is slow. 

So how do we prevent the TAC problem from happening to us? How do we stay the course, and keep the values that got us into the work we do at the center of our work?

1. Welcome the squeaky wheels. The volunteers, staffers, and congregants who are always on you about something? They are your biggest safe-gaurd. You don’t have to always give them everything they want, but you need to hear and welcome their feedback. Use their constant feedback as an opportunity to talk about how your choices are in line with your mission and values, and be honest with yourself when you find it’s hard to make that case. 
2. Engage in rituals that ground you. Have a regular practice that reminds you of the core of your work and its true purpose. If you work with young people, maybe that’s a day of programming where you come out from behind the desk or off the stage and just play the games with them. If you are clergy, maybe this means taking communion together as a staff. Find a ritual that grounds you in the heart of your work and do it regularly. 
3. Don’t let scarcity win. In God there is enough. If you and your community are called to the work and God is present, you don’t need to anxiously fret over what the “competition” is doing, or whether you are growing at the speed you want to. Feeling anxious, particularly as a leader, a founder, and an innovator, is normal, but that feeling of not-enough doesn’t need to get the last word. 

Culture drift is easier to stop than to reverse, so keep an eye on the organization you lead, and make sure your organization is in line with its own values. We are all called to incredible work, but we are called to faithful pursuit of our God first. If you want someone to talk through this work with, or an outside set of eyes on your organization, give us a call, we’d love to walk through it with you.  

1. This is a true story and is all drawn from publicly available information, but including the brand name felt distracting from the point of talking about it here. ↩︎
2. My main source is the podcast American Scandal, season 64, titled “Boeing.” Additional information from the documentary Downfall: The Case Against Boeing ↩︎