If unnecessary or misleading words defy practical risk-management, the ultimate side-effect of those words is how they butcher adoption of a better methodology. People literally spend their days sweating blood over the small things, expending so many scarce resources on utter nonsense they have no ability to address the real risks they face.
Conventional safety wisdom seems to suggest that all that is required to “manage safety” is repeating the same process endlessly, and freshening the terminology to appear progressive. This is where we get the egregious multitude of safe procedures that become so hard to manage they are always out-dated, never communicated, and frequently just plain wrong. This is where we raise the bizarre belief that all risks are created equal, and that we ought to spend the same time, energy and money managing them as equals. At the same time as we all grasp a giant earth moving machine with tires the size of a Winnebago can actually crush human beings in a blink, whereas a wheel barrow that runs you over is probably not going to be fatal, we still often find the safe practices for the potentially fatal asset far less complete than the one applied to wheel barrows. Why? Simply because the degree of expertise to write qualified safe practices for the machine that can kill you would require actually using that machine, or at the very least asking those who do how to define its risk – and that just cuts into the budget for qualifying the risks of the wheel barrow.
It is human nature to focus on what we know, or think we know, and this is really why the same essential accidents uncoil in similar industries from year to year. People continue to fall to their deaths from scaffolds not because we are unaware of the risk of high-scaffolds, but because we spent so much writing an ineffective procedures manual we never got around to auditing whether the employees were adhering to correct practices, or maybe even couldn’t deploy the training to them since the manual ate that budget too. But by mistaking focus, we create and enhance risks.
One of the most egregious abuses of the idea of safety has extended from an increasing application of what can be called the “blind eye effect.” As one traverses the hierarchy from low worker to supervisor and beyond, one often sees that the optics change. The supervisor blasts the line worker for not wearing his protective eyewear, while telling another employee to just use a tagged out forklift on a rushed job, and the executive blasts the supervisor for lack of productivity, while standing in a suit and tie under seven tonnes of machinery without so much as a pair of work boots. This effect demoralises the workplace, and creates an obvious example of how the rules differ for the privileged – which ensures higher risk, since the idea of team approach to safety is dashed by exceptions.
Combining this variance in applying the rules with too many rules ends in disaster. The reality of achieving safety is that it has to become not only rational, but integrated – it needs to be part of the larger operational process, not some stumpy little aspect locked in a back room. To do that, paperwork becomes less important than process, and process drives needs. And process is about consistency, about the same rules applying to all in similar circumstances, and about recognising that simple actions define the real outcomes in workplaces. Spending ten minutes regurgitating a mantra is wasting ten minutes, whereas spending those same ten minutes confirming worker knowledge is saving ten lives.
Safety results in a workplace when two things exist: an awareness of it being a side-effect of doing things well and right; and a commitment to doing things well and right. Safety comes from the management process, and the management process is effective because it recognises realities of the operational context. Safety isn’t enhanced by inventories of activities, because numbers don’t impart quality measures; and metrics is about analysis, not raw number counts.
Size matters to create safety, just as much as knowledge matters to understand context for risk.
Selling a new model into an environment where the focus is on irrelevancies is nearly impossible without laying a logical groundwork that reduces the learning curve.
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