Complacency Arising?

Ask a room full of front-line leaders what goes on the short list of toughest safety challenges, complacency gets a lot of votes. For good reason: complacency governs a wide swath of human behavior and can be found at the roots of many failures in sports, finance and affairs of state.  Why would safety be any different?

As big a problem as complacency is, when was the last time you read an investigation report that began, “The root cause of this terrible tragedy can be found in the simple fact that so many of those involved failed to treat things as seriously as they needed to be”? For some reason, it’s rare for complacency to be described as the cause of a safety event, even when it clearly was.

That’s revealing.

Decades ago, when those in the manned spaceflight business fell victim to complacency, they named it the “normalization of deviation”. Four decades later, it’s one of those terms of art still rattling around in the lexicon. Safety would be better served had they stuck with the less scientific sounding complacency, because clearly that was the problem causing their problems to be ignored because nothing bad had happened yet.

If ever there were a hazard to be taken deadly seriously, theirs would be the one. Nevertheless, every decade or two they had to be reminded the hard way: first, by virtue of an oxygen enriched cabin atmosphere; next came leaking O-rings; later on, it was foam insulation shedding off external tanks.
  
Better known as Apollo 1, Challenger, Columbia. You would do well to dig out the investigation reports and read them as part of your education as a safety leader. Richard Feynman’s quote in the Rodgers Report – “nature cannot be fooled” – is classic.

When it comes to the collateral damage created by complacency, there’s no shortage of examples to be found. Trevor Kletz, known as the “Father of Process Safety” authored a history book of failures in public works and industry, where the same thing would happen every few decades. In his view, “organizations don’t have memories”.

Don’t go jumping  to the conclusion the cycle time for complacency is measured in decades or even years. I once asked a good client, whose business it was to dispatch concrete to customers in ready mix trucks (or in my lingo, cement mixers) how long it took a new driver to become complacent out on the highway. They didn’t miss a beat: “About ninety days.”

Complacency can show up anywhere, anytime, and the problem runs far deeper than simply a matter of forgetting to remember. 

Diagnosing Complacency 

Complacency is a state of mind characterized by an absence of fear. If nothing else, that begins to explain why we’re so inclined towards complacency: given the alternative of relaxed and satisfied versus any of the antonyms for complacency – anxious, concerned, edgy, fearful, nervous, stressed, worried – choosing complacency is the biggest no-brainer on the planet. Our brains are more than happy to accommodate our desire for comfort.

Anxiety comes with its share of critics and its own set of health problems, mental and physical, but, as far as taking things that can harm us seriously, fear is a wonderful motivator. The political philosopher John Locke wrote, “Provident fear is the mother of safety.” 

That complacency exits in the five and a half-inch space between the ears means that it can’t be directly observed; it is detectable by inference. But don’t let that scare you off this target: it’s not the least bit difficult to calculate the degree of complacency simply by listening to words and observing actions, and by taking careful note of what is present – and absent. There are a totally predictable set of words and actions that serve as screaming warning flags.

Warning: those flags do require the payment of attention. In that sense, they aren’t free.

When it’s warranted, leaders are very good at pointing the finger at their followers for being complacent. “They’re just ticking the boxes, going through the motions, not taking things seriously. Next thing you know, they’ll be taking shortcuts.” Consider that observation as paying attention, not being unduly critical.

What often goes undiagnosed is when the leader comes down with a case of complacency, an even more serious problem as it’s highly contagious to their followers.

In managing safety performance, the most obvious warning flag of leader complacency are statements to the effect, “Now that we have our safety performance under control….” That’s the kind of thing said in the aftermath of success: goal achieved, time to move on to the next big thing. The truth is that safety performance is never under control, or anything even remotely resembling that. Zero isn’t really the final destination for the journey. As a practical matter, every good run of safety eventually ends; the question is when and how badly.

In its common manifestation, management complacency is observable by the absence of things: missing in action are urgency, passion, relentlessness, time, energy; showing up and showing up big, like when there’s a crisis. It’s all perfectly understandable: leaders are human.

We often see it in the safety leadership classes we teach to the front-line leaders. When safety performance is poor and safety leadership training as a solution is a command performance, senior leaders are visibly present, in a full court press. Get safety performance back on track, that sense of urgency is noticeably absent. With other, more pressing matters to be attended to, the senior leaders are nowhere to be found near the classroom, mixing it up with their front-line leaders. 

That’s exactly how complacency works.

If You’re Not Worried

Bottom line: success ought to scare the daylights out of a leader, because that’s what leads to becoming complacent. If there’s a ray of good news in that, at least it’s easy for a leader to recognize the presence of that condition, and it’s really not that difficult to actually do something about it, if for no other reason than that problem is under the leader’s control.

The same cannot be said about followers’ complacency. In a recent podcast, Van Long, who had a highly successful four-decade industrial career, passed along a gem once given to him: “The people closest to the hazard are the ones most likely to be complacent about the hazard.”  

As Van put it, “Familiarity breeds over-confidence” as does success. Complicating matters is that followers are often the ones in control of the hazards that can harm them. At best, the leader can only wield influence of those with their hands on the hazard; what’s worse is that having control over the hazard causes complacency.

That makes managing complacency a double-edged sword: keeping followers from falling victim to the natural tendency to become complacent and keeping the hazards they control from making them complacent.

Only adding to your anxiety is one more problem you need to appreciate. Leaders don’t help matters when they misdiagnose complacency as the failure to recognize the hazard. “No worries” is nowhere near the same as “Hazard? What hazard?”

Long story short, complacency is what causes someone not to treat a hazard as seriously as they should. It would not be incorrect to label complacency as a root cause of an unwanted event. As to why complacency seldom shows up by name in root cause investigation reports, I’ll leave that to someone else to figure out. Maybe they can do the root cause analysis. 

As a useful aside, three decades ago I named that step in the improvement process “doing a root cause of root causes”. Whenever I’ve been asked to be part of a safety assessment, the root cause investigation reports are the first place I always go. Looking at them en masse never fails to provide useful insight about all kinds of things. 

If You’re Worried

If you suspect you have a complacency problem on your hands, it’s easy enough to go back through a year’s worth of investigation reports and ask yourself, “Was someone not taking the hazard seriously a big part of the story?” Don’t leave it to someone else to make that determination for you, because they probably won’t. At least not unless you press them to.

On the other hand, if you’re confident you don’t have a complacency problem, you should immediately do exactly the same thing. You might be surprised by what you find. Complacency is perfectly capable of showing in places where it should not, from occupations as diverse as space scientists and cement mixer drivers and organizations with safety cultures fabulous to mediocre. 

Back in the day, tech industry pioneer Andy Grove, who founded Intel with Gordon Moore, inventor of Moore’s Law, had a motto: “Only the paranoid survive.”

One more opposite to being complacent.

Paul Balmert
June 2025