Fix the work, not the worker - Bring real science back to safety
Wayne Reilly
Executive leader and expert in critical risk management, assisting heavy industry to better understand and control critical risk, coaching Leaders in the field to build capability.
We need to shift our safety thinking from trying to change the worker; that is the work of evolution. If we keep thinking that psychology is the science of choice for dealing with safety, we are predisposed to making the judgement that people are the problem, when clearly, it is an energy damage problem. Humans are adaptive, that's why we are very successful as a species. We adapt to our environment and generally tend to behave as the group of people around us behave. In every group of people there are formal / informal leaders, what is accepted behaviour or not, will be largely determined by these people. Errors, mistakes, shortcuts etc. are all just humans being human in their environment, its how we learn and adapt. So if we are going to continue to expose the human body and mind to energies in the workplace that it cannot withstand, lets get over trying to fix the human condition and start fixing the energy damage problem that exists in our interactions with the work, the equipment and the work environment.
In other words, stop trying to tell me that both Newton and Darwin were wrong! .
There are a multitude of behavioural / cultural based programs out there. Despite their repeated failure at enormous cost; they are still seen by many looking for a quick fix as the magic bullet. But, there is no magic pill in the water jugs at these behavioural training programs that will somehow make everyone safe all the time by changing the way our supposedly unsafe workers think. Perhaps we have just become lazy or given into the hype and so sub-contract our safety to others because it is just too difficult to apply our own thinking, leadership, and management effort. You cannot manage hazards and risks just by talking about them and you cant stop people being human. Sooner or later contradictions in the ‘theories’ lead to contradictions in behaviour, the magic disappears and the workforce becomes cynical, as the next fad comes along, making everything their problem again.
Doing the same things over and over and expecting different results is insanity (Albert Einstein).
Now, lets go back to real science, the scientific method where we "observe without judgement", simply what is and what is not"; we ask questions, experiment, form and test hypotheses to understand the current state. In the workplace, this means to observe and enquire about what people know / not know, do / not do, what equipment has / does not have or what it can detect / indicate and what features in the environment are present or absent that could lead to unwanted damage. We need to have a good understanding of the work, work environment and equipment, but it is even better to draw insights from people, like subject matter experts and a cross section of the workforce by asking focussing questions about the damaging energy interactions that can occur as a result of configurations of people (physical and social), equipment and the work environment when the work is being done (see pic below).
We also need to apply a more scientific / taxonomic approach to the analysis of lead and lag data. Rather than spitting out graphs of descriptive statistics, someone with the right capability must organise and structure the data in the way that reveals what is really happening in terms of energy interactions.
When was the last time you saw a safety professional truly apply the scientific method to understand the current state. It is more likely that solutions were pulled out of a standard bag of tricks i.e. training, systems, rules, checklists, paperwork etc. before any real attempt was made to understand the problem. If there is any analysis, it is usually an audit or behavioural / cultural survey that never seem to look at anything tangible. We over focus on compliance, systems and behaviour at the expense of science, engineering, leadership and the power of teamwork. Sure, we have made inroads on minor to moderate injury rates, but this is largely due to stricter rules / laws, less discretion given to people, improved technologies and the way classify the injuries. The tragic fact is that permanent, fatal and multi-fatal events have flat lined for some time now. We cannot continue to think that our obsession with minor cuts or rolled ankles will address the critical risks; as there is completely different phenomena and a whole different order of magnitude of energy at play.
Perhaps we should revisit the energy based thinking of Hugh De Haven in the 1940s and William Haddon in the 1960s, as we have gone off on a tangent without giving good sense a real try.
Our attempts to be very clever with cutting edge psychology, organisational behaviour or social / emotional intelligence, is not all that smart, when you think about it. The scientific method has proven itself over many centuries in helping us understand complex problems or to ask the right questions at least. Why are we not actually helping management and leaders understand and react to real risk as part of their normal work or business agenda without having to experience a major accident to get their attention. With the right information in hand and not locked away in a database or someone's memory it will empower your organisation to focus on what matters most when it counts. At the same time, a healthy dose of situational leadership and dare I say it "supervision" would not go astray; getting leaders out from under the paper work, quotas or training they are constantly burdened with to be actually out there leading again. Hearts and minds will be engaged, inspired and captured when they are properly informed, rather than constantly confused about safety and collectively working towards things that add value, not wasting their time.
If you think its difficult or costly to change the workplace, try changing people without doing anything about what's around them.
There is no magic! I would encourage anyone who feels their safety programs are missing the point to get in touch with me to discuss your current state, before its too late.
Executive leader and expert in critical risk management, assisting heavy industry to better understand and control critical risk, coaching Leaders in the field to build capability.
9 年Terrance makes a good point below, and so I would like to clarify the scientific methods I talk about and the contrast between my approach and what is commonly found in the "peer reviewed literature on safety or accidents at work. I do not think I'm any smarter than the academics currently researching safety or accidents from an organisational psychologist's perspective. I just fundamentally disagree with the over-focus on behaviour and culture, with a decided lack of interest in the energy that damages people and how organisations are marshalling it. I refrain from quoting peer reviewed articles for the simple reason that I feel there are enough people quoting other people in these articles and I prefer to think, talk and act on what I see, touch and too often experience when in the field investigating accidents, including fatal / multiple fatal ones. The scientific principles I talk about are the basic principles that are currently and have always been applied to all research in the physical sciences, from medical science, biology, ecology etc. to astrophysics. For example, to understand disease, Epidemiology uses evidenced based analysis, experimentation and observation to understand the relationship between human physiology, risk factors and vectors in the environment to cure disease. The problem in much of the literature and the research I have not too happily budgeted for when working in big companies is that it too often suffers under the fallacy of mono-causality i.e. all accidents are dependent on just one element or variable in the equation. Too many "peer reviewed' journals and other articles on safety, seem to be proposing the new frontier is that we have done all we can about the other variables and so we are just left with the worker to change. As if we can "immunise" people from energy by giving them a healthy dose of behavioural and cultural therapy. Don't get me started on fatigue, it is a topic for another time, suffice to say the articles read too much like a sales pitch for a fatigue management technology. Before you think that I'm saying all literature and research is like this; there is great stuff happening with new equipment / vehicle technologies, ergonomics, design safety etc. However. I'd like to see it dominate, make more noise; get into the faces, ears, minds and hearts of leaders and safety professionals above the other stuff. Too much is coming from people in the fields of business, law and organisational psychology. Unlike myself, and the people commenting on this article, they have never been a worker or spent a day in the workplace exposed to complex risks. Often they write literary reviews or heavily reference other academics who have never had anything to do with high risk work or hazardous energy either. I have even seen articles that even support another authors hypothesis without presenting any additional / new evidence, observation or experimentation. Even worse, there is no evidence rejecting any other alternate hypothesis. When was the last time you saw that in medical research, without that person being outcast by their peers? When real analysis is provided, it is accident / injury data. Often, however; this data is completely unclean, sourced from a regulator or big business. This data is an unstructured mess of dependent variables without defined reference to the true independent variables of any accident (hazardous energy) e.g. gravity, chemical, thermal, vehicular, machine, human, biological etc. Therefore analysis of this data produces lovely graphs of descriptive statistics (like Bird’s triangle), without first having someone who understands the work, the workplace and equipment clean the data and structure it around the energies that impart the damage / injury. Descriptive statistics are not inferential statistics, nor do they provide insights to act upon, but too often it is acted upon, or should I say reacted upon and we get another poster campaign or behavioural change program to end all our worries. Look at all the misguided programs and people that resulted from Bird's triangle, I think Swiss Cheese has a lot to answer for also, but please no death threats from the Reasonologists. All I'm advocating is that injury and damage in the workplace, like everywhere else in the universe comes from an energy reaction / interaction, but involves a human element. The human element makes errors, acts and omissions, but it always will; we are after all, human. I have investigated far too many accidents and have never come across a person who was doing anything, other than what they thought was right, or it was a practice / condition ignored by their peers, leaders and managers. It is always the case that when an accident occurs, the workers, leaders, and managers did not fully understand or appreciate how the configuration of work, workplace, people and equipment exposed people to an unacceptable level of risk. I have colleagues who have investigated thousands of fatal and permanent damage events, likely more than anyone else and they say the same thing. If we are really honest with ourselves, we could all say that at one time or another we have all made acts, omissions or errors that under the right conditions would have serious consequences and that we can’t always understand implicitly everything that is happening around us at all times in a complex environment. A fundamental principle of science is that what has happened before will happen again. If you look at the pattern of fatal and permanent damage, you see this to be true. You also see that fatal and multiple fatal damage to people has flat lined for the last 20 years, despite minor and short-term injuries decreasing significantly. The most successful operations and projects, I've worked with; understand and address their critical risks using a simple Analyse (observe, enquire, test); Understand; Plan; Do; Check; Act cycle carried out rigorously "In-Situ"; not in some academics office. In following this cycle, Leaders are informed and can then truly lead by applying a combination of process changes, hazard controls, coaching and monitoring to make a huge difference to efficiency, quantifiable risk, and near-miss / injury occurrences. All this without ever reading a peer reviewed safety journal. Personally, I prefer they go and look at energy interactions in the field; talk to workers, subject matter experts and colleagues about damaging energies; or read an expertly done taxonomy, bow-tie, event tree, failure analysis etc. (Look-Listen-Learn). As an engineer and scientist, I may be pre-disposed to follow the more proven methods of the physical sciences and analyse how the source energy becomes imparted on the person, so I can make changes to how the people, equipment and environment interact in those circumstances. My laboratory is the field, too often the accident scene, but If more were doing this, I'm certain we just might find that we are doing a lot more about the behaviours and ultimately culture than all the obsessive focus we have on it now.
HST Professional | Safety Leader, Process Improver
9 年Interesting opinion piece. If you truly believe in the scientific methodologies, list the current peer reviewed scientific journal articles that prove your position. A lot has changed in 70 years, including the social structure, science and technology. Occupational safety is at a cross road, I know because I am standing in the middle doing the measurements, unlike most who are sitting in the gutter waiting to be told what to do next. Bringing back the Austin A40 will not resolve anything, because the Austin A40 could not pass the current ADR's. De Haven & Hadden cannot pass the modern rules either. But that is just my opinion :)
Health and Safety Advisor.
9 年Yes Indeed !
HR professional
9 年Good article there Wayne. Well done.
Executive leader and expert in critical risk management, assisting heavy industry to better understand and control critical risk, coaching Leaders in the field to build capability.
9 年Love your work Bob. When Im on site you provs could not tell me apart from those big dirty smelly people, that's how I get shit done. How else are you supposed to understand what works and what dont. Having a background on the tools and as an engineer helps, Unfortuneately too many shiny bums, and psychology majors get Ohs jobs and too many bean counters get management jobs.