Fleet Maintenance - 32

MANAGEMENT
»The alert fleet professional will
notice which bias is in play and then
conduct their conversations and make
their decisions with thought.
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away with it that the original standard, in
which any O-ring damage was intolerable
deviance, was marginalized.

3. Correlation implies
causation

Guard against
mental fallacies

Remaining free from unconscious biases can help
fleet maintenance personnel make better decisions.
The human mind is powerful, but some naturally occurring biases might mitigate that
power. These biases blind the person to what
is right in front of their eyes. None of us are
immune to this effect.
The alert fleet professional will notice which
bias is in play and conduct their conversations
and make their decisions with thought. The
following is a list of ten biases to watch out for.

1. Fundamental
attribution error

The attribution of a problem to individuals in a
system rather than to the system in which they

Joel Levitt

PRESIDENT OF SPRINGFIELD RESOURCES
Joel Levitt is the president of Springfield Resources, a
management consulting firm that services a variety of
clients on a wide range of maintenance issues. Levitt
has trained more than 17,000 maintenance leaders
from more than 3,000 organizations in 38 countries. He
is also the creator of Laser-Focused Training, a flexible
training program that provides specific, targeted training on your schedule.

32 Fleet Maintenance | August 2020

If two facts are correlated, are they related
by cause and effect? A recent medical article
stated the results of an extensive study of
children who take Tylenol being more likely
to have asthma. The news article leads with
"Tylenol causes Asthma?" The author wanted
an unsophisticated public to think that correlation implies causation.
But in fact, correlation does not imply
causation. The relationship between two
variables does not automatically mean that
one causes the other. In this case, children
who take Tylenol might have more colds and
take more Tylenol. There is proper research
that viruses are causally related to asthma.
Correlation but no proof of causality is a prevalent problem in research.

4. After the fact, therefore
because of the fact

find themselves is so pervasive that psychologists call it the fundamental attribution error.
In 2001, John Sterman, director of MIT's
System Dynamics Group, and Nelson Repenning,
distinguished professor of System Dynamics and
Organization Studies at MIT, published an article in the California Management Review titled,
"Nobody Ever Gets Credit for Fixing Problems
that Never Happened." The people are not the
problem; the system is. We need to fix the system
so the people can do better work. We need everyone helping to identify and fix the system, and
only by working cross-functionally is it possible
to succeed.

This mistake is so popular and well known that
it has a Latin phrase describing it: "post hoc
ergo propter hoc," meaning, "after this, therefore because of this." It requires that one event
occurs before the other.
It is a fallacy which states, "Since event X
followed Y, then X must have been caused by
Y." If I change grease in a bearing and the bearing fails, we might be clever and say that the
new grease caused the bearing failure. But in
fact, we need evidence beyond the mere time
relationship for proof.
It is a legitimate question (and a valuable
one) to ask what happened before the failure
or what has changed. The leap (without good
evidence) from something happening first to
that thing being the cause is "post hoc ergo
propter hoc" thinking.

2. Normalization of deviance

5. Cherry-picking

Normalization of deviance occurs when people
repeatedly accept a lower standard of performance until that lower standard becomes the
norm. NASA astronaut Colonel Mike Mullane
relates the story of the Space Shuttle Challenger.
The NASA team accepted a lower standard
of performance on the solid rocket booster
O-rings until that lower standard became the
norm. They had become so comfortable with
seeing occasional O-ring damage and getting

An observer who only sees a selected data set
may thus wrongly conclude that most or all
the data is like that. Cherry-picking can also
be found in other logical fallacies. For example, the fallacy of anecdotal evidence tends to
overlook large amounts of data in favor of some
other cause.
Cherry-picking is the bane of medicine.
Advertisements tout a new cure to high blood
pressure or high blood sugar. If you track down

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Fleet Maintenance

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