Many years ago, I worked in an aircraft maintenance org. We had recently had a few close calls on the flight line; if we had not been so lucky, people would have died. The subsequent investigation revealed that people were pushing themselves too hard and were exhausted by all the overtime they were doing.
The group leader decided to have a meeting about our “CAN DO” attitude and how it was leading us toward a disaster of our own making. So far, so good. They told us that we had to stop this or someone would get killed and that missing a scheduled flight was not worth the price someone would have to pay.
Great right…..
The next item on the agenda was an upcoming deployment of aircraft (3 in total), and we currently only had two that were available and one that was down for an extended period of time (changing engines). One of the section leaders informed the group leader about this, and his response was
“GET ON WITH IT; It needs to be done, so GET IT DONE.”
It was thought the person had forgotten entirely what he had said a few mins ago.