I may be an atheist, but I do support the idea of religious tolerance. My attitude is live and let live. As long as someone doesn’t start telling other people to live their lives according to their own religiously inspired rules I am happy. If they want to paint themselves blue once a week and worship their belly button lint, they can for all I care. That is the black and white position. Unfortunately in the real world things are more often grey.

What then do you do when a person tells you they are making professional decisions based on what the belly button lint is telling them? In this case it isn’t that the person is saying “according to my religion, we cannot do this…”, rather “it was revealed to me that the correct action is…”. The impact is indirect, but potentially quite serious.

Is it religious discrimination to want them well away from your work?

The fundamental thing is the basis a person has for making decisions. You could argue that to a degree a factor has to be the success of the decisions they are making. But as an engineer I can’t be happy with “we got the correct results, don’t worry how we got there”.

Back when I was working for Procter & Gamble we had to use all sorts of methods to solve problems with production line machinery. Together with the rest of my Process Engineering colleagues we were trained in a variety of trouble shooting techniques (like fishbone/cause & effect analysis, reliability engineering and Kepner-Tregoe). If some piece of kit fell over and you helped get it going again you were expected to be able to demonstrate how you identified the correct solution. “I had a hunch” would not get you any brownie points. It was as important that the reasoning behind making the decision was as sound as the outcome. Otherwise how could you be sure that you had the correct answer this time, or that you could get the right one in the future? How could you teach your approach to the rest of the organisation, or reapply it in other areas?

If I had repeatedly taken a “seat of the pants” approach to troubleshooting I would have got poor performance reports and been blocked for advancement. My point is that how you get your answers is as important as the result.

To return to the original question then. If you have someone that is using religious or superstitious methods of coming to decisions, can you intervene and tell them that it is not acceptable? I would like to be able to. But I think I could see myself very rapidly in front of HR or the labour court. What do you think?