Fail Miserably

I was in a conversation with a dear friend and mentor. We were discussing the need to include “fail safe” and “fail lucky” in incident review boards and incident classification. I was arguing that this will be both helpful to provide a great learning opportunity to know how many of the incidents are “fail safe” and how many are “fail lucky”. It will also drive the conversation around barriers in the review boards when we see an incident marked as “fail lucky”.

Yet he struck me with a question that took me totally of guard. “What if that incident was neither both?”. I gave him this denial look and said what does he mean by that. He expanded: “If you have an incident of an amputated finger for instance, how can this be fail safe or fail lucky? You didn’t fail safe at all and you were definitely unlucky because the damage took place”.

I was puzzled. He has a point we must include this third category as well in our consideration and thinking. It’s unfair to have this as “fail unlucky” because this really diminish what happens by labelling it “unlucky”. This is a case of “fail miserably!”. Fail miserably is just like that; a case were failure took place and the worst outcome also took place, which is the worst type of failure. We need to think about it similar to how we think about fail safe and fail lucky, and fundamentally, we need to continue to learn and improve in every given opportunity! From failure and from normal work. Fail safe is where you want to be, Fail lucky is where you are given another chance to improve, Fail miserably is where you should never be!

Are you looking into your type of failure when you learn from incidents? What type of failure does most of your incidents falls into? What does that tells you?

Learning from Failure will not go away, because Learning from Normal Work always tell us that failure is just around the corner. As we continue to talk about Learning from Normal Work, we need to master our ability to Learn from Failure.

Improving Safety is all about learning; and when do you stop learning? Never!

#Learningfromnormalwork #Learningfromincident #SafetyLeadership