About the Role of the Specialist in Organization

Speaker A If you have a manager and with a specialist, give him advice, should he take it? What's the position of it? Classic saying quite clearly, it's up to the line manager whether he accepts it or not. If he accepts it, then it becomes part of his responsibility, his accountability. If he doesn't accept it, again, it's that same position. Now, the specialist may feel, if he's in breach of overall company policy, that he then may say to the land manager, well, you don't take it, but actually, I'm going to advise your manager that you have refused to take this advice. And you find specialists who don't know what they should be doing didn't take any notice of what I said. What did you do? Well, I didn't do anything. Well, you should have done something. And the idea of having specialists, having that sort of authority, is often alien, because looking at what happens in some of the rail disasters, it's clear that this was not specified, that if you see there is a breach of the rules, it is your responsibility to go and report that breach. It's not good enough to say, well, I gave him advice, but he didn't take it. But it was interesting in the recent in the Paddington crashes about the they've now prosecuted. They're starting to start to prosecute the senior managers in the organisation personal culpability. But it's very interesting. Under the rail safety sections, the instructions to drive is quite clear. If you're at all uncertain about a signal, you do not pass that signal, irrespective of whether there's been a problem with it before. The rules are absolutely crystal clear. The train driver in that situation, in my view, was highly culpable. Okay. The other contingent, perhaps the signal shouldn't have been in the right place. Yes, perhaps they should have taken it elsewhere and all the rest of it. But at the end of the day, I suppose it was the two thing. You know, you don't want to blacken the name of a man that's now dead, but I think they shirked the issue because of all the union ramifications. Well, it's clearly not the driver's fault, but in fact, in my view, it was the driver's fault. But all these typical areas of accountability, if you're not specific about it and showing what people should do in those things, then it's very difficult to blame people if they misbehave or act inappropriately in these situations. Sam.