The Acceptance of Failure

One of the most discouraging realities of a decade and more of research is that it tends to confirm executive management has accepted failure in the safety realm, and seeks not to resolve problems, but to mask them since they seem intractable. The traditional safety purveyors have made it worse by promising change, then resorting to “tried and true” methods that have never delivered positive change, reinforcing the view that safety is a black hole for productivity, investment, and time. It is not a wonder that management rejects safety as a real practical priority when their direct experience has been so negative, and it is no surprise that the idea of a shift in thinking meets resistance, since for years the same-old-same-old has been represented as just that – a shift in thinking.

The problem with accepting failure where safety is concerned is that without change, the cost of doing business increases over time until its weight collapses the reason for doing business. It would be far better, and safer, to embrace a real shift in thinking, but the barriers to that are real, and the challenges when one does shift to the new opportunity are real.

Risk-management is not a standalone solution, a tool that just drops in and solves all the problems, because it depends on so many other systems functioning. It depends on being fed good data, in a timely way, and upon being able to have the range of expertise in an organisation act to increase its value. Even for companies who can access their own data effectively (though we have yet to encounter one), accessing employee expertise becomes an almost insurmountable barrier to adoption. Traditional safety practitioners are highly resistance to being exposed by the evidence the system will generate, managers are hesitant to trust another system when so many betray their interests, and workers are suspicious after so many years of being fed lies about something they understand – safety in the workplace.

To reject failure means to recognise that the claimed problems, are often the symptoms of the actual problems, and to treat them means to treat the problems that lay beneath those systems. It means to understand that operational risk-management requires cultural dexterity, commitment, and a desire to continuously develop new opportunities for productivity. There is no status quo condition for risk-management, and that dynamic of continuous change and continuous cyclic improvement can be daunting to many.

Ultimately, though, one has to wonder if the failure you know is actually safer than the pursuit of excellence. The answer to that question may be irrelevant, given the evidence of actions, which speak louder by far than any words. And yet with the trend toward prosecution along with the failure to act reasonably, it is clear that something must change, and that at some point smart executives will demand more than raw counts to base their perception of workplace safety. The question is not if this happens, since it will inevitably, but exactly how long a timeframe exists for those who cling to antiquated ideas about safety are pushed into the light. How many more bodies need to be piled at the gates of industry before they recognise that far too many of those bodies could have gone home, if only the risks that took them had been managed.