In November of 1987, a commuter at the King's Cross station in London approached a ticket collector and said he'd just seen a piece of burning tissue by one of the building's escalators. Rather than investigating the matter or notifying the department responsible for fire safety. Instead, he simply returned to his workstation, thinking it was someone else's responsibility.
This was perhaps not so surprising. Responsibilities in running the London underground were divided into several clear-cut areas, and, as a result, staff had formed an organizational habit of staying within departmental bounds. Over the decades, an intricate, hierarchical system of bosses and sub-bosses, each highly protective of his authority, had emerged. The nearly 20,000 employees of the London Underground knew not to encroach on each other's terrain.
Under the surface, most organizations are like this: battlegrounds on which individuals clamor for power and rewards. So, to keep the peace, we develop certain habits, such as minding one's own business.
Soon after the ticket collector returned to work, as usual, a huge fireball erupted into the ticket hall. But no one present knew how to use the sprinkler system or had the authority to use the fire extinguishers. The rescuers, who were eventually called in after a long series of failures to act by several employees at the station, described passengers so badly burned that their skin came off when touched. In the end, 31 people lost their lives.
The failure at the heart of this tragedy was that, despite its complicated system of responsibility distribution, no single employee or department at the London Underground had an overview responsibility for the safety of passengers.
But even such tragedies can have a silver lining: crises offer a unique chance to reform organizational habits by providing a sense of emergency.
This is why good leaders often actively prolong a sense of crisis or even exacerbate it. For example, in investigating the King's Cross station fire, special investigator Desmond Fennel found that many potentially lifesaving changes had been proposed years earlier, but none had been implemented. When Fennel encountered resistance to his suggestions, too, he turned the whole investigation into a media circus – a crisis that enabled him to implement the changes. Today, every station has a manager whose main responsibility is passenger safety.
