Garda Inspectorate report on Crime Investigation

The Garda Siochana is not actually a dysfunctional organisation. The answer to its problem is actually very simple

When Paul O'Neill became CEO of the Aluminum Company of America, or Alcoa, and addressed investors for the first time, his opening words were: "I want to talk to you about worker safety." Charles Duhigg recounts, in his excellent book The Power of Habit, how the confused audience reacted with a stunned silence as his vision for the company was laid out - zero injuries - suspecting that "given his talk of worker safety, O'Neill might be pro-regulation. Or worse, a Democrat. It was a terrifying prospect."

O'Neill then pointed out the safety exits. One investor recalls running out of the room and ringing his top 20 clients and telling them to sell their Alcoa stock immediately, saying the board had put a crazy hippie in charge and they should get out fast before the rest of the audience got out of the room and told their clients the same thing.

In fact, they would have been foolish to sell. Within a year, Alcoa's profits hit a record high. Thirteen years later, when O'Neill retired, Alcoa's annual net income had increased sevenfold and the company's market capitalisation had risen from $3bn to $28bn. Alcoa also became one of the safest companies in the world.

And it all went back to something O'Neill had tried to tell the investors at that initial briefing. When investors started asking questions about capital ratios and inventories that first day, he said to them: "I'm not sure you heard me. If you want to understand how Alcoa is doing, you need to look at our workplace safety figures. If we bring injury rates down, it won't be because of cheerleading or the nonsense you sometimes hear from other CEOs. It will be because the individuals in this company have agreed to become part of something important: They've devoted themselves to creating a habit of excellence."

So instead of coming in with some grandiose top-down vision that he would implement, O'Neill came in with a very modest proposal - to change certain habits that would start a chain reaction and change other habits in the organisation. And this change came from the bottom, from each guy there being motivated, in the interests of his own safety and that of his colleagues, to change his habits. So all across that organisation people changed their own habits, for their own motivations, not because some hotshot came in and told them to.

I thought of Paul O'Neill last Wednesday morning listening to The Garda Inspectorate's Deputy Chief Inspector Mark Toland on Morning Ireland. Shortly before Toland came on, 'What It Says In the Papers' had reported headlines about the Garda Inspectorate report that portrayed a broken force.

And then Toland came on and was actually very careful not to suggest a broken force. In fact, what he was saying was that the Garda Siochana was under-resourced, with outdated IT systems and not enough boots on the ground for fighting crime. But mainly he was saying it was a force with bad habits, and many of these habits could be very easily fixed. In fact, many of the 200 recommendations made in the Garda Inspectorate report could be implemented, right now, at no cost. Robert K Olson, the Chief Inspector, was also at pains to point out that the Garda was not a dysfunctional force. It was mostly full of good people who were , he said, "frustrated with the status quo and anxious for change".Or, as Toland put it, they do not come in every day intending to under-report crime.

A lot of it is simply down to bad habits, a lack of day-to-day supervision, because the ones who should be supervising are busy with administrative work. So it's simple things like them not being there to encourage people to upload everything in their notebook onto Pulse before they go home in the evening. Obviously, there is the parallel issue of resources and up-to-date technology here, which should be easily dealt with too if the will is there, but fundamentally, this will be held up as a question of what to do about that nebulous thing, "the culture" of the Garda.

Culture being a deeply ingrained thing, a virus that permeates everything, written through an organisation like the writing on a stick of rock, present in every cell, it will seem like a mammoth task to change it. The usual answer to these situations is to bring in an outsider to take over - some guy from the Met (no disrespect to Toland) or some guy who was head of something in Ryanair who will bring private sector dynamism to the whole thing.

But if we understand that culture is really just a collection of habits, then we know that this will not work. Anyone who tries to come from outside into the swamp that is the Garda will not be able to get a real handle on how to change things. They will be running around as the organisation goes into defensive mode at a perceived threat from an outsider.

In reality, the only ones who can change the Garda as an organism are its members. And we will not make that happen by beating them up or imposing a solution. The members of the inspectorate were smart enough to see this, and smart enough to see that attacking the members of the force is not the answer here. The simplest way to revolutionise the Garda Siochana now is to incentivise the people in there who are "frustrated with the status quo and anxious for change" to change their habits. We do this by making the resources they need available to them. Here are the fingerprinting machines you need, now please make it a habit to take everyone's fingerprints. And this change, from the bottom up, will revolutionise the organisation. The micro-changing of habits across the organisation will revolutionise the nebulous macro that is the culture.Most people want to do their jobs properly and effectively. You just need to give them the means and the encouragement to do so and they will. The Aluminum Company of America discovered this as the focus on safety, which was supported by workers, unions and management alike, caused costs to come down, quality to go up and productivity to skyrocket. This happened because, as Charles Duhigg says: "If you focus on changing or cultivating keystone habits, you can cause widespread shifts. However, identifying keystone habits is tricky." The Garda Inspectorate has identified the keystone habits. In a sense, the difficult bit is done. Now we just need to help the gardai, with the carrot, not the stick, to change them.