A Review of The Courage Factor: Living People-Based Leadership by E. Scott Geller and Bob Veazie

Give this book to anyone you want to turn on to behavioral approaches to safety.

OverviewI planned to skip the fictionalized, illustrative story line and just skim for the authors’ main instructional points. But instead, their excellent writing so caught me up in the plight and emotional upheavals of Joanne Cruse, the plant safety director that, pathetically slow reader though I am, I read the book cover-to-cover in one setting, occasionally stifling a tear (no kidding) when I over empathized with Joanne’s pain as she struggled to (a) be a good mother and wife, (b) go beyond the success she’d had with old-school behavior-based safety to understand and implement the newly evolved people-based® safety, while (c) avoiding being fired by the plant manager Mr. Pillar the Killer. But the book is more than just a page-turner; it is well written, insightful into human nature and human interactions, insightful into the corporate world, insightful into the subtleties and complexities of organizational culture, and insightful into the need for the organizational culture to support behavioral interventions designed to improve any significant feature of a corporation, including its safety performance--ideal for introducing labor and management to people-based® safety and motivating them to delve deeper into this approach to organizational safety, so that they can implement such a program in their own organizations.

The Details

Based on the authors’ considerable organizational experience, the book is realistic, down to the manager who doesn’t look at his employees when they report to him, because he has such great multitasking intellectual powers he can continue working at his computer while those employees address him; and yet he has such meager interpersonal insight that he can’t understand why this multitasking offends the employees. And the authors have such contemporary insight that, when heroine Joanne fails to stop and help the stranded neighborhood teenager with her road-side car problems, she rationalizes, “ … to hell with it. Every kid nowadays has a cell phone … .” I also liked their concept of the “generic smile,” appropriate for all occasions, signifying nothing. And I liked their multi–dimensional treatment of the characters: Joanne’s moral strengths doing battle with her moral weaknesses, her confidence doing battle with her self-doubt and her defensiveness, and Pillar the Killer’s brutishness masking his intelligence and insight. And in spite of their books finely nuanced approach, the authors wrote it simply and clearly, assuming no background in OBM, though I did have to Wikipedia “cat’s paw.”

By the way, each of the ten chapters starts with a relevant, classic quote that could almost be compiled into the ten commandments of how to do it right, how to be an effective person.

The authors present people-based® safety as evolving out of behavior-based safety (non-®), not as a revolutionary approach. They argue that we should not only provide the workers with feedback and incentives for their safe behaviors, but we should ensure that the corporate culture supports safe behaviors. In other words, they seem to be suggesting a behavioral-systems approach to the entire organization, that we ensure management goes beyond explicit performance management and, for example, also addresses the safety impact of the physical environment and production demands, a much more difficult task than encouraging peer safety feedback, which, itself, is no easy task. In addition they suggest management should treat the workers with compassion, with the implication that this will improve safety performance. 

The authors generally seem to put down acronyms, such as ACT and LOVE, perhaps because acronyms may lead to simplicity, which causes me some consternation, as I was starting to think a cool acronym or two might help us save the world with behavior analysis. But, in turn, they hustle their four C’s – Competence, commitment, courage, and compassion, with the later two being a major contribution of the evolution from behavior-based safety to their people-based® safety.

They suggest that it’s not enough to be competent, committed behavioral-safety experts, but we must also have the testicles to do what it takes to ensure the implementation of effective safety programs; and presumably too many safety experts are anatomically deficient in that area. For example, we need to be brave enough, or fool hardy enough, or naïve enough to say The Manager has no clothes on, or at least no safety goggles, if we are to ensure the implementation of effective safety programs. Could be. But it’s hard to discriminate between being chicken and simply choosing our battles wisely.

Compassion is even more interesting, perhaps even more important. We must not only be committed to implementing our program, but we must also be compassionate about the potential beneficiaries, we must lose sleep worrying about the injured worker and not be satisfied with the expedient of merely having our secretary send flowers to his hospital bedroom. And we must also be compassionate about our the colleagues whom we may have to roll over to get our program approved, we must lighten the roller as much as possible and have the first-aid kit handy as we roll out our new program.

But practicing all of the four C’s requires more than a great motivational book like The Courage Factoror listening to a great motivational speaker, even if the speaker’s adopted all the floor-pacing, power-preachin’ techniques of his Baptist-preacher daddy. Hard though it may be, pumping people up is the easy part. Maintaining that pumpedupness is the Achilles heel of workshops. Practicing the four C’s requires accountability, at least weekly, if our resolve is not to turn into feces as we become overwhelmed by our daily minutia. We need a weekly meeting with our father, ah … no, our mother confessor, preferably our Jewish mother, someone who will hold us accountable for our weekly practice of the four C’s, especially courage and compassion. “What! That’s only perfunctory compassion. That’s not passionate compassion. You make your mother ashamed of you, you spineless, lazy, self-centered little phony! Now get out there and show some real compassion.” The last person who was so together he didn’t need a Jewish Mother died on the … ah … oh well, he had a Jewish mother too.  

In fact, The Courage Factor has me so pumped up, I’m going to incorporate courage and compassion accountability into my weekly performance-contracting meeting with my own professional Jewish Mother (or as we in the biz say, JM). In other words, safety is only one of countless areas where the four C’s apply. For example, I need to be courageously compassionate, with the cute, little autistic kids my university students tutor, with my cute, not-so-little university students, and damn, even my far-from-cute university colleagues (the hardest part of all).

The Devil Behind the Details

As faithful readers of this journal may know, during my declining years, I’ve invested large amounts of my waning energy mercilessly criticizing Geller’s writings, in a vain effort to bring him into the fanatical, radical behaviorist camp. Why stop now.

#1 The Puffball Critique

I’d be impressed if it would be anywhere as easy to turn the boss around, in a single morning’s meeting as their story line suggests. And while I’m more than willing to grant the authors poetic license in their fictional story line, it might be unfortunate if any of their readers took this as a job aid on how to convert Mr. Obstinate into Mr. Sympathetic. However, I’d be interested to know the authors’ real-world case histories that would suggest otherwise. (Incidentally, they ask the readers to submit their own people-based®-safety case histories for posting on http://people-based-safety.com/. And incidentally #2, perhaps we serious-scientist behavior analysts should relax our high JABA/JOBM-esk methodological rigor enough to dally with a post-modern behavior analysis that values the insights we can gain from thoughtful case studies, even though our confidence in those insights might not be as great as if they were derived from multiple-baseline, multi-element, reversal designs; because sometimes we may need to tradeoff a little rigor to supplement triviality with socially and/or intellectually significant insights.)

#2 The Inner-Cause Critique

As I understand it, the authors suggest that our active caring, our acting in a caring manner, results from four inner causes – competence, commitment, courage, and compassion. Fortunately, these inner causes are not considered inflexible, biologically programmed traits; rather, they are flexible states influenced by the external environment, by courageous active caring by others, and even by active caring by the person him or herself.

However, I suggest that we should avoid circular statements like, “She acts courageously because she is courageous (she has courage, an inner cause).” This leads to the circular follow up, “And I know she has the inner state of courage because she acts courageously.” We should avoid trait nouns like “courage.” Courage is not a thing we have. Instead, we might say, “She acts courageously because that behavior has been reinforced, reinforced either through the presentation of a reinforcer or escape from or prevention of an aversive condition.” Of course, the sort of behavioral history that results in courageous or compassionate behavior is complex, subtle, and not easily arranged (we don’t really know much about how to do it). But if we are to help people reliably act courageously and compassionately, we must discover the behavioral histories that will provide the repertoires and values (learned and unlearned reinforcers and aversive conditions) that will result in courageous, compassionate acts. Simply settling for fictional, circular inner causes, like the states of courage and compassion, is likely to prevent the search for less simplistic analyses, especially with the tendency for malleable states to readily morph into inflexible, biologically determined states. So, generally, I suggest that the terms used to describe these and most other inner causes are better used in adverb form to modify the behavior the inner state is said to have caused, rather than as nouns naming causes within the behaving person.

#3 The Aversive-Control Critique

As do most behavior analysts, the authors neglect the motivating factor that holds our world together, the factor without which we’d be sitting in caves scratching cooties; and that factor is aversive control. I suggest we need more than the four C’s to get the active caring the authors strive for. For example, my world is full of issues I really care about, issues I can competently, courageously, compassionately, committedly address; but I somehow don’t get around to it. I care, but not actively. Why not, because I put off addressing those issues until tomorrow; I put them off the issues until they are so far down my to-do list they don’t even fit on my 30 inch computer screen (e.g., as of this writing I have 4,283 emails in my in boxes [really], and that doesn’t include the hundreds of great Viagra offers; why? – because I wasn’t able transfer the even older 3,000 unanswered emails from my old Dell to my current Mac). So, if I’m such a degenerate, how is it I’m managing to worm my way down to the conclusion of this admittedly brief review? Because of my friend and yours, aversive control; I’m accountable for an hourly emailed “progress” report to my hysterical, professional Jewish mother who will cut me a new aperture if I slack off. So why is it that you’re able to be so productive and effective, without a professional JM always hounding at your heels? Look closely back to your early history (like pre-high-school, or even pre-grade-school), and you’ll find your own JM, one who put the fear of failure and disgrace on you so hard that if you get within 100 miles of a deadline, you break out into a cold sweat and get your rear in gear. And, if you were not fortunate to have an early childhood JM, I can send you the email address of my professional adult JM.

Conclusion

In conclusion, wouldn’t it be cool if Geller and Veazie’s Courage Factor would be the shot in the arm for behavioral approaches to safety that Let Me Hear Your Voice has been for behavioral approaches to autism, though behavioral approaches to safety ain’t exactly anemic and is already the golden boy of OBM.