Safety Moment – The Importance of Weak Signals

We’ve all experienced it. Something doesn’t seem right – the pump sounds slightly different, the valve feels odd when you open it, the discussion had a strange tension to it, something is just “off”. These are “weak signals” that may indicate an impending problem and it is extremely important that we pay attention to them because they give us an opportunity to proactively intervene.

Humans are remarkably perceptive to changes in their environments, especially experts who are intimate with the systems and equipment they work with every day. I’ve been involved with many equipment and system failures over the years and on many occasions, during the subsequent root cause analysis one or more people mentioned that something was different or didn’t seem quite right prior to the failure. In my own experience, many times I’ve had that “feeling” that something wasn’t right, didn’t pay attention to it, and sure enough something went sideways. It’s taken a while, but I’ve learned to listen to “my gut” and stop and investigate when I get that feeling because I’m often perceiving a weak signal.

The problem we have is that we’re surrounded by a lot of noise, we’re perpetually busy, and weak signals are easy to miss or ignore. In addition, when people become experts on systems, they also get comfortable with and adept at dealing with variability and often push past that “feeling” to just get the job done. However, I believe that there is no downside to pausing and investigating when you get the feeling that something just isn’t right. That “gut feeling” often indicates a weak signal that is warning us to dig deeper.

A proactive safety culture looks for and acts on weak signals. And here’s the rub – there will be false positives. Not all weak signals turn out to be red flags, sometimes they’re just an odd combination of factors that are outside normal operating experience or sometimes we’re just plain wrong. However, I argue that it’s better to be safe than sorry. I would much rather someone speak up when they detect a weak signal, so we have the opportunity to investigate and see what it’s telling us as opposed to the person pushing past it and then later having a discussion about how something “just didn’t seem right” when we’re doing a root cause analysis after an incident.

So, let’s pay attention to and talk about weak signals. As managers, we need to accept that there will be some false positives but paying attention to weak signals has more upside than downside and we will learn from every conversation we have about the way we work.

Stay safe out there!