Practical Drift

Corporate Safety and Crisis Management

Colonel Scott Snook coined the term practical drift in 2000 in his book Friendly Fire, an analysis of the causes of an incident that occurred during the Iraq War in 1994. Two U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopters were accidentally shot down by friendly fire from two U.S. Air Force F-15C Eagle fighter jets in the no-fly zone over northern Iraq, killing 26 members of an international peacekeeping mission. Snook developed the theory of practical drift to explain how local practices tend to slowly drift away from established written standard procedures when those standards do not seem to practically fit the situation at hand, whether it be a routine task or an emergency situation. Practical drift can be found in a variety of companies and fields, including that of crisis management.

Snook's theory identifies situational coupling, logics of action, and time as critical factors influencing practical drift. First, practical drift can be affected by whether an organization is loosely or tightly coupled, meaning whether an organization's different units have a higher or lower degree of local autonomy in decision making. The second critical factor, logics of action, incorporates the opposing practices of operating based on formal guidelines, usually handed down from the top of the organizational hierarchy, and operating based on local decisions based on the task and situation at hand. Such informal localized practices are more likely to develop when workers feel the formal corporate guidelines do not match their situational reality or needs, such as safety or productivity requirements. Local workers and units can shift between the two forms of operation over time.

Finally, an organization's stability can change because of the critical factor of time, which can encourage or reinforce the emergence of practical drift. In a loosely coupled organization, practical drift that has set in over time may go unnoticed until a crisis emerges. Response to the crisis requires tighter coupling, as units must work together. Each unit will expect the other to operate according to the formal crisis management plan or safety guidelines, even if they themselves have been using localized practices. Practical drift in routine operations thus silently sets the stage over time for poor response in times of crisis. Organizations with more stringent, less flexible procedures are more vulnerable to practical drift caused by adaptation to localized conditions over time.

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