Titan disaster: Who tells the CEO they're wrong? 

Tony Jaques evaluates the leadership issues that led to the OceanGate submersible Titan tragedy
 

Image: Miguel Á. Padriñán | Pexels 

The tragic loss of the deep-sea submersible Titan is increasingly being presented as a crisis which didn’t have to happen.

While investigations are already under way to determine the exact cause of the loss – with lawsuits likely to follow – the focus is turning to the boss of OceanGate and his refusal to heed safety warnings from external experts and his own employees.

Indeed, Stockton Rush, CEO and co-founder of the company, told one critic as far back as that he was: "Tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation," and that: "We have heard the baseless cries of 'you are going to kill someone' way too often."

Some commentators are painting Rush as a bold adventurer, and argue that without adventurers who push the boundaries – like the Wright brothers or the lunar-bound Apollo astronauts – society would be denied risky innovation.

But is a bold adventurer the right person to be CEO of a company? Sadly, Rush can’t now speak for himself as he was one of the five who died when his experimental submersible imploded under intense water pressure.

Although OceanGate is a privately held company with only about 50 employees, the Titan disaster raises the important question: How do you tell the CEO they are wrong, even when they are convinced they are right and reject expert advice?

US corporate governance expert Kurt Stocker at Northwestern University once quipped: "Top management, by definition, is the least informed group in the company when it comes to bad news. Nothing moves more slowly than bad news running up a hill, a very steep hill."

In the same vein, American academics Paul Nystrom and William Starbuck have argued that top managers should listen to and learn from ‘dissenters, doubters and bearers of warnings’ to remind themselves that their own beliefs and perceptions may not be correct.

The reality is that in most crises, someone inside the organisation was aware of the problem in advance, but information was either blocked or ignored. Corporate structures and systems too often prevent uncomfortable truths from reaching top management.

The answer to this challenge was neatly captured by an unnamed CEO in a management report on the paradoxes of leadership: "One of the most important things is having people around you who tell you how wrong you are."

Yet, as the case of the OceanGate disaster reveals, it is not enough to simply have employees and others who are willing to speak up. The CEO needs to listen and take action.

To help make sure red flags don’t get ignored, there are some structural steps any organisation can take.

• Establish a formal process for risk identification and prioritisation
• Actively encourage blame-free upward communication of bad news
• Engage with stakeholders to identify potential issues
• Listen to doubters and critics, not just yes-men
• Support a mechanism for all employees to raise issues and concerns
• Monitor the media, call centres, and customer feedback for emerging problems
• Implement proactive planned actions to prevent issues from becoming crises
• Formally assess all incidents and near-misses and take action to manage risk

Rightly or wrongly, in many organisations, the role of 'dissenters, doubters, and bearers of warnings' falls to the communication professionals. It’s a role which needs to be handled with care to avoid being labelled a troublemaker or not a team player. But it’s an essential part of deciding and implementing what’s best for the organisation.

Red flags exist to warn of potential crises, and organisations that fail to heed them are destined to suffer the consequences.