Recommendation: Act upon or Ignore?

I was reading through the latest Work and Safety Analysis (WASA2022) published by IRATA when I suddenly had the feeling of deja vu.

For those that are unaware the WASA is a report that is released each year with data and statistics of everything IRATA. From the number of member companies to the number accidents and deaths, Number of hours worked and the number of employed staff.

My main interest in these publications is at the back, the "Recommendation" section. The "Whats happened and How can we make it better".

In the latest WASA (2022) recommendation section we see:

Whilst ‘life is not without risk’, this industry depends more than most on controlling risks. Thus, risk assessment and hazard identification, including pre-start inspection of work sites, continued to be essential (examples in Conclusions). Further, continued surveillance during conduct of work, particularly when conditions were liable to change, had also been found necessary. Therefore, it is recommended that managers and supervisors should be encouraged to improve endeavours to identify potential hazards.?

When reading the conclusions that precede the recommendations it is fair to say the above warrants its place. The fact that all three fatalities within the previous year were suffered by Level 3 technicians, and presumably all experienced, cannot be ignored.

Deja Vu?

I was almost certain that 'Hazard identification' was the previous years recommendation, I then looked back at earlier WASA publications 2021, 2020, 2019.... All had the recommendation regarding the identification of hazards and the assessment of risk.

Two of the recommendations in the WASA 2013 were "Prevention of rope damage and "Dropped objects". Even though the wording of "hazard identification" isn't present the fact remains that the hazards were not being identified and thus controls put in place.

So every WASA available has a recommendation that seems to be going un-acted upon and repeated year after year. All analysis is on IRATA member companies only, Although it would be unfair and together untrue to say non members are altogether immune to the same issues.

How can we change this? Training? Experience? Common Sense?

For sure training plays a major role both in the cause and in the remedy. Recently I set the question "Is IRATA training to cheap?" And in my opinion it is. Raise the cost - Raise the standard. Dedicate more time to Hazard identification and Risk assessment. If you are interested the link is here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/irata-training-cost-race-bottom-james-hollingsworth/

Experience of the technician, A lot of people I have spoke to have raised the point of techs rushing through their tickets to get to Level 3 as quickly as possible. Is it right? well its not wrong according to the TACS, if they are 18 years old they can take their level 1, 1000 hours and years experience, can got for their level 2, same again and they can do their 3. Personally I think this should change to a minimum age to become a Level 3 set to 22 years old, Or mandatory 3 years at level 1 and 3 years at level 2 to be accrued before Level 3 course.

Common sense, apparently not so common. Some will argue you can't teach common sense, Some will say we all have the ability to learn and thus be able to learn common sense. I would say the majority of us are continually learning from our environment and the things we do, this gives us our common sense. If you run a rope over a sharp edge it will damage our rope. Ok I won't do that again, I have learnt, it now becomes part of our common sense. But some seem to differ in this process of thinking.

In 1957, Leon Festinger—one of the most influential psychologists of all-time put together a groundbreaking paper ‘A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance,’ which exposed our psychological tendencies. He noted "The Ego Effect".

It suggests that you’re prone to making the same mistakes over and over again, when you protect your beliefs instead of learning from your mistakes and changing your beliefs in response to conflicting evidence

Rather than own up to our mistakes and learn from them, we tend to invent new explanations as to why the mistake occurred, or ignore the conflicting evidence altogether.

Do they believe that because they have passed their independent assessment that it can't possibly be anything wrong with what they are doing?

The WASA is a much needed publication and credit must go to IRATA and its staff for compiling, but it needs to be understood and acted on. We must learn from the data, whether it be from the unfortunate fatalities and injuries or the recommendations.

Ultimately, the people and organizations that embrace failure and create a strong culture around learning from the mistakes, will thrive.?

As always I look forward to peoples opinions, ideas and comments.

For those that are interested the Work and Safety Analysis publications are available free to download on the IRATA website as are all the Safety Bulletins.

(https://irata.org/page/work-safety-analysis-reports)

(https://irata.org/safety-bulletins)