SAFETY & COMMON SENSE??????? Common Sense "IS NOT COMMON"!

I have come across many people with a perception that safety is nothing more than a lot of common sense. I do agree to a very short extent because there are a lot of problems with this mindset.

What is COMMON SENSE?????

Aristotle, the first person known to have discussed "common sense", described it as " the ability with which animals (including humans) process sense-perceptions, memories and imagination in order to reach many types of basic judgments. In his scheme, only humans have real reasoned thinking which takes them beyond their common sense."

When coming to safety, being able to understand the hazards and dangers are essential for staying safe. An effective response requires people to be capable enough to identify as well as foresee these situations.

Making judgements on the identified dangers also requires skill. This is where the reliance on common sense will fail since people have different levels of training, abilities, perceptions, experience and priorities in taking decisions.

How can we measure common sense? Something which is common sense to ME may not be the same to YOU and vice versa. There is no precise scale or measurement when someone gains it and believe me, it's hard to measure.

Relying on common sense in safety is like assuming everyone will work safely, they will follow all safe systems on their own, but that will never happen.

Safety comes from effective planning, having a risk-based thinking approach, risk assessments, implementing systems, effective management, properly implementing technical and procedural controls, improving the knowledge, skill and perceptions of the people through continuous and rigorous training, working on human behaviour and human reliability, continuous review and careful analysis of performance, proactive and reactive monitoring, having leading and lagging indicators, taking corrective actions etc etc etc...

So, Common Sense is not an inherent trait of society. Even though there is a shared desire to be safe, the actions to be taken to accomplish that are not really obvious.