Simple Guiding Principles: Why simplicity matters when it matters most
During recent LEGO® Serious Play® training, a recurring question surfaced: What exactly is a Simple Guiding Principle (SGP), and are they genuinely useful for teams, or just another abstract idea?
This is a fair challenge. Many organisations already have values, behaviors, policies, frameworks and playbooks. Adding yet another artefact can feel unnecessary unless it clearly earns its place.
One of the clearest answers comes not from a creative workshop context, but from a catastrophic failure: the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.
The Challenger Disaster as a Case Study
In 1986, NASA launched the Space Shuttle Challenger in unusually cold conditions. Seventy-three seconds after launch, the shuttle broke apart, killing all seven crew members.
The technical cause is well known: failure of the O-ring seals in the solid rocket boosters. What is less obvious, but far more instructive for teams and organisations, is how that launch decision was made.
The subsequent inquiry and later sociological research by Diane Vaughan revealed that the failure was not the result of recklessness, incompetence, or a single bad actor. Instead, it emerged from entirely normal organisational behaviour.
Diane Vaughan’s findings and the Normalisation of Deviance
Vaughan’s research introduced a now-widely-used concept: the Normalisation of Deviance.
In simple terms, this describes how:
- Small deviations from expected performance occur.
- Nothing immediately catastrophic happens.
- Those deviations gradually become accepted as “normal”.
- Past success is reinterpreted as evidence of safety.
- Risk slowly migrates from “unacceptable” to “routine”.
At NASA, engineers had observed O-ring erosion on previous flights. Because the shuttle had landed safely, those anomalies were progressively reclassified—not as warnings, but as acceptable performance.
This was not a failure of values. NASA cared deeply about safety. It was not a lack of intelligence or expertise. It was a failure of decision framing under pressure.
What NASA changed afterwards
Following the Challenger and later Columbia disasters, NASA articulated a set of recommendations to change how decisions were made in the face of uncertainty. Among them were the following six recommendations (source: Terry Wilcutt & Hal Bell, Senior Management ViTS Meeting, November 3, 2014):
- Never use past success to redefine acceptable performance. Consider risk decision options after in-depth analysis and objective assessment of scenario-driven probability and severity.
- Require systems to be proven safe and effective to operate to a formally acceptable risk level, rather than the opposite.
- Prevent groupthink; know and avoid its symptoms. Appoint people to represent opposing views or ask everyone to voice their opinion before discussion.
- Keep safety programs independent from those activities they evaluate.
- Balance project schedule, milestones and operational tempo against available resources based on an impartial, comprehensive risk assessment.
- Employ a rigorous systems engineering process. Seek a safe and balanced design in the face of opposing interests and conflicting restraints. Focus on assessments to optimize the overall design and not favor one system/subsystem at the expense of another.
These are excellent principles. They are thoughtful, comprehensive, and cognitively demanding, underscoring the need for simple decision anchors, such as SGPs, to support effective choices.
Clarifying the Landscape: what Simple Guiding Principles (SGPs) are and are not
Teams often confuse SGPs with other organisational constructs. It helps to draw clear distinctions.
Values: What we believe is important (e.g. “Safety first”, “Respect”, “Innovation”).
Behaviours: Observable actions that express values (e.g. “We challenge assumptions”, “We escalate concerns early”).
Governing principles: Formal rules that constrain decisions (e.g. regulatory requirements, safety thresholds, compliance standards).
Operating doctrines: Established ways of working in a given context (e.g. engineering playbooks, delivery methodologies, standard operating procedures).
Simple Guiding Principles: Short, memorable decision anchors used in the moment, especially under time pressure, ambiguity or stress, to help teams feel confident and secure in their choices.
SGPs do not replace the others. They sit alongside them, but play a different role.
Why Simple is not a Weakness
In high-pressure situations, teams do not reach for long documents. They rely on what they can remember, repeat, and quickly test decisions against. This is where SGPs earn their keep.
NASA’s post-Challenger recommendations can be reframed into SGPs without losing their intent. For example:
- Never use past success to justify safety.
- Prove safety before proceeding.
- Actively invite and protect dissent.
- Keep safety independent of delivery.
- Do not outrun your resources.
- Optimise the whole system, not the parts.
These statements are easy to recall, easy to challenge in conversation, and easy to use as a pause point in decision-making. These are not slogans. They are thinking constraints. They create friction at exactly the point where momentum might otherwise carry a team forward unchecked.
Why SGPs matter in Teams
SGPs act as decision anchors. They legitimize pause, dissent and reflection without requiring someone to be heroic. They give teams a shared language for interrupting risk before it becomes normal.
In LEGO Serious Play training, SGPs often emerge naturally when teams build models of how they want to behave under pressure, not just when things are going well. Their power lies less in the phrasing and more in shared ownership and repeated use. An unused SGP is just another sentence on a wall. A lived one quietly shapes decisions long after the workshop ends.
What Else Might be Worth Adding?
If you are working with teams on SGPs, a few additional considerations strengthen their impact:
Origin: Was the SGP co-created by the team, or imposed? Ownership matters.
Trigger moments: When should this principle be actively invoked?
Language: Does it sound like how the team actually speaks?
Tension: A good SGP usually constrains something people want to do.
Rehearsal: Has the team practised using it in realistic scenarios?
SGPs are not about control. They are about clarity when clarity is hardest to find. And that, ultimately, is why they are worth taking seriously.
