The news just gets more jaw dropping by the week. So let me get this straight. A guy walks up to a ticket counter with no passport, buys a one way ticket for about $3,000, pays cash and has no baggage. Oh yea, and his dad reports him to the US Embassy as a security threat a few days prior.
The result?
He is allowed to fly to the United States and attempts to set off a bomb on approach to the Detroit airport.
The response?
Put in place enormously expensive scanning equipment that generates naked pictures of passengers. See this:
New Airport X-Ray Too Revealing?
We have here another story of extremes. We have taken two very good things: technology and solid work procedures, and cleansed them of an essential element, namely professional judgment.
In so many professions: accounting, medicine and of course security, we see a disturbing predisposition towards trusting technology and procedures (bureaucracy) over the judgment of a well informed human being.
To illustrate our point let’s stick with this example of airport security for a moment.
Having been a frequent international traveler, I am very aware of the differing approaches to airline security. The primary method in most of the world is human interaction with the passenger.
That’s right, to board the plane you have to talk to airline security personnel.
“Where are you going? Business or pleasure? Oh you’re an American, what’s your favorite baseball team?”
These are all questions that have been asked at one point or another. The questions are designed to get the passenger talking. Security personnel are looking for blank stares, stuttering, uncomfortable body language, etc. as indicators that something is amiss.
Indeed over time security personnel learn to recognize patterns of speech and behavior that are indicative that the passenger is not bona fide. To quote the author Charles Hugh Smith:
“The human mind seeks patterns and trends as a key survival strategy: if we can anticipate a problem before it overwhelms us, or discern a pattern or cycle in the world around us, we can make a timely and very beneficial corrective adaptation.”
Contrast this method with ours (and others) technology and procedure focused approach to airline security.
Security personnel have minimal verbal interaction with passengers and are very focused on staring at screens and operating machinery. When a person or a piece of luggage fails an initial screening then the security person follows a rote set of procedures to check the person or carry-on luggage. Rarely is the passenger engaged in any questioning.
Businesses are no exception to this predisposition. Policies and procedures have reached epic proportions and there seems to be a slavish devotion towards software packages.
My friends, technology and procedures are the handmaidens to human decision making and not their master. If we strip the human element out of the decision making process our systems become hopelessly ineffective.
The best functioning systems are those that marry people, processes and technology. Competent management must then manage this symphony in the right proportions to ensure that all the pieces are in place and are functioning effectively.
Now that we have described the symptoms can we identify the disease?
This is the hard part.
Maybe it’s because we have taken technology and elevated it to a religion like status. Perhaps we are soothed by the false security of having machines do the thinking for us because “machines don’t make mistakes.”
Alternatively maybe we live in collective fear of our own legal system. If we make a judgment, someone might disagree with our decision and serve us with a lawsuit. Procedures are seen as a way to tell the legal system, “Hey I just did what I was told.”
Sadly maybe some believe that well educated and trained humans are simply too expensive to maintain and do not provide sufficient benefit.
I would posit that these are gigantically flawed views.
Returning to the subject of airport security, there is an example of an airline security system that relies more on humans than technology and that rewards professional judgment more than following procedure.
See this:
How the Israeli’s do Airline Security
This article is an interview with Isaac Yeffet, the former head of security for the airline El Al and now an aviation security consultant in New York. Here are some of the more interesting things he had to say:
“We must look at the qualifications of the candidate for security jobs. He must be educated. He must speak two languages. He must be trained for a long time, in classrooms. He must receive on-the-job training with a supervisor for weeks to make sure that the guy understands how to approach a passenger, how to convince him to cooperate with him, because the passenger is taking the flight and we are on the ground.”
“If there was any failure, the security people immediately were fired, and we called in all the security people to tell people why they failed, what happened step by step. I wanted everyone to learn from any failure. And if they were very successful, I wanted everyone to know why.”
“When you come to the check-in, normally you wait on line. While you wait on line, I want you to be with your luggage. You have to meet with me, the security guy. We tell you who we are. We ask for your passport, we ask for your ticket. We check your passport. We want to find which countries you visited. We start to ask questions, and based on your answers and the way you behave, we come to a conclusion about whether you are bona fide or not. That’s what should happen.”
El Al has not had an airline tragedy in the past 40 years.
Anyway I’m sure the billions we are spending on technology and new security procedures are just as good as the judgment of well trained and well educated security personnel.
I still can’t help wondering; however, what would have happened if someone had asked the hapless terrorist mentioned above, “Dude, where’s your passport?”
Have a great week,
Michael Bechara, CPA
Managing Director
Granite Consulting Group Inc.
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