Thomas Schares, MD, MBA, an anesthesiologist with Somnia Anesthesia who serves as chief of anesthesiology for Desert Regional Medical Center in Palm Springs, Calif., discusses the phenomenon known as ...

“When the sociologist Diane Vaughan came up with the term ‘the normalization of deviance,’ she was referring to NASA administrators’ disregard of the flaw that caused the Challenger space shuttle to ...

To some extent, many organizations, if not all, suffer from some form of performance deviation. This can manifest itself in any goal or standard against which organizations may measure themselves.

We’ve all seen it: A deviant behavior is repeated, without catastrophic results, and eventually becomes the accepted social norm for the organization. This process is called the “normalization of ...