The Hidden Forces Shaping Boeing’s Culture of Safety

What behavioral signals and informal networks reveal about Boeing’s effort to rebuild trust and safety under intense market pressure.

Executive Summary: Boeing’s safety crisis reveals how culture plays an under-appreciated role in shaping employee behavior. We explore how internal signals, trust networks, and behavioral cues may have contributed to the erosion of its once-reliable safety standards. As the company works to rebuild from within, tools like Organizational Network Analysis and behavioral insight offer a practical path forward by leveraging the same informal dynamics that helped shape its culture in the first place.

When Market Pressure Rewires Culture

For decades, Boeing was synonymous with safety. Its engineers helped set the global standard, and its reputation was built on engineering trust, precision, and consistency.

But in recent years, something shifted.

Airbus was gaining market share—surging ahead in deliveries, ambitiously ramping up production, and positioning itself as the new leader in global aviation. Boeing, once the unshakable standard, was now under pressure to compete. Faster output equated to higher revenue. While slower delivery meant lost orders, falling analyst confidence, and a sliding stock price.

Internally, Boeing’s dynamics began to change. Production delays and reputational pressures began to mount. A Reuters investigation looking back at the period found the company increasingly focused on speeding up output rather than strengthening quality systems.

Production speed became the metric that mattered. According to the 2024 FAA audit, employees reported feeling pressure to meet production times, even at the expense of quality.

It’s the kind of tradeoff every executive recognizes: the quiet tension between risk and reward. But at Boeing, that tension had catastrophic consequences.

From the 737 MAX tragedies to the most recent 787 Dreamliner crash, the continued fallout has exposed more than isolated failures. It revealed a deeper cultural erosion where safety signals were missed and, according to whistleblower accounts, may have been outright ignored.

Seeing the Early Signs of Cultural Drift

Most companies don’t lose their culture overnight. It slips quietly, slowly, and often without notice.

At Boeing, the official message never changed. Safety remained the stated priority. But over time, the internal signals drifted. Employees learned that what got rewarded wasn’t caution, but speed. Raising concerns came with risk: missed deadlines, frustrated managers, or worse, being branded as a blocker. Eventually, some of those escalations stopped coming altogether.

This is the kind of shift Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) can now help identify before tragedy strikes. ONA draws on collaboration data, surveys, and communication patterns to show how hidden influence, trust, and decision-making operate on the surface. It often highlights the underlying source of why strategy and execution begin to drift.

When combined with behavioral economics, it helps expose the social and political influences that shape culture, as well as the natural human response to those influences. When the internal signals reward speed over scrutiny, people take note. They still care about safety, of course; but the unspoken rules of culture speak louder.

That erosion doesn’t show up in dashboards or compliance reports. But moves quietly and efficiently through informal channels—passed from person to person across the organization’s employee network. Over time, the culture changes. The people who adapt quickly are seen as team players. While the ones who challenge it are labeled as resisters and pushed to the periphery of the organization.

That’s why it matters not just what a company says it values, but how leaders and people of authority model and reinforce those values. When explicit communication competes with implicit rewards, they distort surface-level messages. Culture always wins.

The Tradeoff that Rewired a System

In any high-performance organization, there’s a pervasive tension between speed and risk. It’s tempting to treat these forces as opposites: one drives results, the other slows them down. The problem isn’t the existence of this tension, but how the culture chooses to prioritize them under pressure.

While people might hear the policy, they’ll respond to subtle cues, like who gets promoted or which projects get funded. Inside Boeing, pressure to perform became embedded in the day-to-day decisions of managers, engineers, and factory leads. Boeing didn’t explicitly say “go faster no matter what.” It didn’t have to: the internal signals made the message clear.

According to the whistleblower accounts, the once formidable culture of safety, which relies on open communication networks, began to fade. Questions and concerns that were once met with curiosity, were now shrouded in fear of backlash. That’s where informal influence, such as from direct managers or prominent advocates becomes critical. As Boeing’s safety inspectors and quality engineers were losing their voice, the paths for raising safety concerns were quietly eroding.

When Repair Requires More Than Policy

The FAA’s 2024 expert panel and follow-up audits confirmed what many inside Boeing already knew: the cultural safety systems had eroded. Despite official commitments to safety, employees described a widening gap between what leadership said and how the business operated. Most concerning was the finding that production goals were prioritized over adherence to processes and quality standards.

That kind of pressure builds gradually and becomes increasingly risky to anyone attempting to challenge it from the inside.

This is potentially why so many safety concerns never reached the people who needed to hear them. And why, when employees did speak up, their warnings often got diluted or dismissed. Never with nefarious intent, but in a company as complex as Boeing, the pressure to deliver can come from all corners of the organization. Eventually, the culture becomes so oppressive that no one speaks up.

“I was ignored. I was told not to create delays. I was told, frankly, to shut up.”
-- Sam Salehpour, a Boeing engineer, in US Senate committee hearings

ONA could have helped surface these early warning signs of the growing disconnect between frontline employees and top leadership. It could have identified where communication was stalled, which voices were being sidelined, and where fear or fatigue was weakening the system from within.

But it still needed a voice. ONA can help find those people, too, and put them at the center of the change.

Rebuilding Culture From The Inside

The FAA was right to demand a cultural overhaul. Boeing didn’t just need new policies, it needed to rebuild a culture of trust, starting from the inside. The challenge now isn’t just identifying what went wrong. It’s making the cultural repair sustainable. Quickly.

That’s where most cultural change efforts fall short. Companies roll out training programs or send out new leadership messages, but the effort stalls when it doesn’t resonate with the people who do the work. Employees have heard it all before (this author included) and you wait to see what really changes.

But culture doesn’t move on fancy, consultant-derived slogans. It moves through real people in real interactions. And that’s the critical element to note about culture: we model our behavior based on what we see around us.

This is where ONA is undervalued and starting to gain traction in cultural transformations. By targeting the same mechanisms and pathways that eroded safety in the first place, Boeing can strategically and surgically deliver the right messages through the right people. ONA identifies employees with existing cultural and political capital—the ones with an earned history of trust and reputation for safety—that can shape the culture from the inside.

Imagine you're a VP of Operations overseeing the 787 Dreamliner program. You’ve just received a directive to enhance Boeing’s Safety Management System. You could launch a webinar, hold an all-hands, or put new posters on the walls. Which you should, but you know that won’t be enough.

Instead, you start identifying the people your teams already trust when it comes to advancing safety protocols. These are the voices that were previously sidelined, but ones that you will now intentionally increase in visibility. These aren’t figureheads, but credible culture carriers. And they’re your best chance at changing behavior from within through the collective extension of their influence.

And that’s where behavioral economics re-enters the picture to help design those cultural nudges. Just as before, employees change behavior because the signals around them shift. That means when the right people model the right behaviors, intentionally weighted signals originating from central parts of the organization can rapidly spread across the network. When amplified by formal messages and reward systems, leaders can even accelerate cultural change.

At Boeing, the VP of Operations can use those cultural influencers to lead trainings, serve as Safety Management System (SMS) Champions, or simply reinforce the behaviors the FAA requires them to adopt.

The benefit isn’t just speed. It’s sustainability. When the right voices carry the message, others are more likely to listen, engage, and replicate. And in a company rebuilding after tragedy, that kind of peer-driven influence is essential.

When Culture Decides the Outcome

Culture is often treated as a backdrop: something many leaders mistakenly believe well-developed strategy or operations can overcome. But strategy consistently fails when it competes against culture.

As Boeing’s repeated crisis makes painfully clear, culture defines what behaviors surface, and which decisions are prioritized. When leaders fail to pay attention to these cultural signals, the consequences can be dire if not tragic.

The lesson isn’t just for aerospace. Any organization under pressure—whether from competitors, investors, or internal mandates—can fall into the same trap: prioritizing speed and performance over reflection and dissent. Not because leaders intend harm, but because informal dynamics start sending the wrong signals.

That’s why culture change can’t just be managed from the top down. It must be understood from the inside and worked from the bottom up. Tools like Organizational Network Analysis, paired with a behavioral lens, give leaders a way to spot trouble early and to activate the people and networks to make change stick.

About the Author

Jason is a behavioral economist and founder of 3Fold Collective, a cultural transformation firm helping leaders diagnose and reshape organizational dynamics. His work draws on two decades of experience in organizational research, Fortune 500 strategy, and consulting.

References:

Cantwell, M. (2024, February 26). “Statement on independent expert panel report critical of Boeing safety culture.” U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2024/2/cantwell-statement-on-independent-expert-panel-report-critical-of-boeing-safety-culture

Federal Aviation Administration. (2024, February 26). “Expert panel review of Boeing's organization designation authorization and safety culture.” U.S. Department of Transportation. https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/Sec103_ExpertPanelReview_Report_Final.pdf

Federal Aviation Administration. (2024). “Updates on Boeing 737-9 MAX aircraft [Ongoing FAA oversight activities].” U.S. Department of Transportation. https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/updates-boeing-737-9-max-aircraft

Insinna, V., Lampert, A., Shepardson, D., & Hepher, T. (2024, February 9). “How production pressures plunged Boeing into yet another crisis.” Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/how-production-pressures-plunged-boeing-into-yet-another-crisis-2024-02-09/

Isidore, C., Wallace, G (2024, April 17). “Boeing whistleblower: ‘they are putting out defective airplanes’.” CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/17/business/boeing-whistleblower-safety-hearing

National Transportation Safety Board. (2024, August 6-7). “Investigative hearing: Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 door plug blowout.” NTSB. https://www.ntsb.gov/news/events/Pages/Alaska-Airlines-1282-Inv-Hearing.aspx

Pawlyk, O. and Bikales, J (2024, April 17). “What we learned form a day of Boing hearings.” Politico. https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/17/boeing-hearings-takeaways-00152931

U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. (2024, March 6). “Hearing on aviation safety and FAA oversight [Testimony of FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker].” 118th Congress. https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2024/6/faa-oversight-of-aviation-manufacturing

This is far more than theory. I’ve used these concepts as the Director of Strategy and Transformation at a Fortune 500 organization to nudge and accelerate a 15,000+ employee digital transformation. We moved the culture in half the time consultants estimated, saving millions in fees and reducing employee impacts, all while nimbly moving into our new strategic environment. You can read that story here.