Safety: Learning from normal operations
Learning from accidents and incidents is a must to prevent these unwanted events from happening again.
But let's also consider the following point of view (with thanks to Craig Marriott from his book "Challenging the Safety Quo"):
"Roughly people work around 2.000 hours per year over a 50 year career: 100.000 hours per career. An accident rate of one per million hours therefore equates to approximately one accident for every 10 careers. This is pretty safe. I think most people would agree that working for 10 ten lifetimes before an accident occurring is acceptable. What this means is that, by restricting ourselves only to accident data for learning, we have very, very little information available to use. We can increase this by an order of magnitude by investigating near misses as well, but it remains small. In any case, the events that cause fatalities often don’t have any obvious near-miss precursors. Learning from normal operations, however, opens up every hour of every day for useful information. There is so much more to learn, it just takes a little more effort and engagement.
If we can learn from normal operations, we can capture those that are innovative and share them, while finding those that are riskier and redesigning the task to take away the motive for doing them. Learning from normal operations allows us to remove them long before they eventuate."
Freelance health & safety culture consultant, facilitator and presenter
6 年Absolutely right... learning only from failure gives us a very small data set. Learning from how people get the job done in variable conditions gives us an increased chance of discovering where the next fatality will come from.
HSQE Director - Challenging the perspective of safety
6 年Like it Rob, identify how we create positive capacities, learn from them, make them more resilient and share them
02aug63 - 17jun20
6 年Safety is a muscle, not a burden! Aarnout Mijling