Skid Row and Business
What does businesses and Skid Row have in common?
Leaders in charge of fixing safety, or fixing Skid Row, miss the boat on what the problem is
Let me explain with a story
Mark Laita is a photographer, documentarian and owner of the YouTube channel 'Soft White Underbelly'. I first heard of Mark and his work when he was a guest on the Joe Rogan Experience.? If you haven't heard of Mark or listened to his podcast episode on Joe's show on Spotify , I highly encourage you to check it out.?Bear in mind that his content and some of what he discusses isn't really safe for work, so would caution you to experience the conversation outside of work hours.?Mark used to be a high-powered executive in the marketing/advertising world. Now, Mark is a storyteller or at least, interviews people about their own story.
He started this project of Soft White Underbelly on the infamous streets of Skid Row in Los Angeles, California.?Skid Row, if you aren't familiar with it, I would Google it to see some of it for yourself. Skid Row is overrun with homelessness, drugs, prostitution and violence. Many people have tried to fix the problems on Skid Row, and all have failed.?
The LA Times reported back in July of 2021 that the legislation in California passed a new budget for approved expenditure on the homelessness problem of a whopping $4.8 billion (Plachta, 2021).? If you research this a bit further, you will come to find that a lot of budgeted monies in this area don't end up going directly to the problem in which its designed to fix.?Instead,?and this is the case in a lot of charitable type efforts, a lot of money goes toward administrative costs to run the programs created to fix the problems. Here is a good article on an example of that. This isn't to say that?people who are given the money or are necessarily doing anything nefarious, although that does happen a lot unfortunately, but the cost of running any organization is expensive.?Costs for high salaries (whole separate discussion), fixed costs, marketing etc. all add up.?
This all leads me to the original point.?
What does businesses and Skid Row have in common??The people put in charge to fix problems are not addressing the right problems.?
Let me ground the conversation here in that the problems I'm discussing in reference to businesses are the safety and health related issues. I guess you can look at this in the same lens for quality or any other process, but here we're talking specifically about?not addressing the right problems in terms of safety.??
Mark describes in detail, in his many years spent interviewing people on Skid Row.?He has built a perspective on what the real problems are plaguing those who call Skid Row home.? The commonly understood issues surrounding Skid Row are: homelessness and drugs.?So, to address that,?some (legislators, charities, good samaritans) see it as a problem of people without homes.?Money has been spent and buildings have been vacated or erected to house those who are homeless.?But that hasn't fixed the problem. Others see it as a problem of people addicted to drugs.??Money has been spent for drug therapy, to get those addicted clean.?But that hasn't worked.?Others see it as a problem of people without jobs.??Money has been spent for job programs to get them to a place of personal and financial independence.?But that's hasn't worked. Mark says to really identify the root of the problem you have the "peel back the onion".?
As he describes, you see people who are homeless, well, why are they homeless???They are addicted to drugs and have essentially ruined their lives to the point of no return.?Why are they addicted to drugs???Could be a lot of different reasons: escape from life, divorce, job loss, mental health issues etc.? Peel back the onion more, where did the mental health issues stem from???A lot of them stemmed from some severe childhood trauma of which they never have addressed and has essentially ruined them.?Peel back the onion more, where did the childhood trauma come from???A lot came from parents, other family members abusing them, some in and out of foster care experiencing physical and emotional abuse for years.?
Mark, without even knowing it has performed a root cause analysis to find the true root of how these issues manifested. His perspective offers parallels to what we see in business.?We find that our business leaders when discussing safety, fall short of ever finding the true root cause and such, the right and effective corrective actions to prevent recurrence. Take for instance this incident description I saw the other day:
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Description: Two colleagues are working in a storage area, where a ladder is being used improperly. The ladder falls, but neither staff member is in the area and no property is damaged as a result.?
Cause: ladder not properly secured by the staff member
If you conclude it there, it's easy to see that those involved would likely blame the worker and re-train them to the standard.?Side note, sometimes, but more infrequently, workers do knowingly deviate from the?procedure.?That is a problem in and of itself and requires attention but don't get that confused with root cause.?Root cause is something different than the motivation behind behavior. Behavior or reasoning for doing something does not always equate to why the behavior or reasoning existed in the first place.? Using this example, we need to explore further and ask why the ladder was not properly secured by the staff member.?[Insert 5 why cause analysis tool here]?We do this and come to find, workers were cutting corners in order to save time.?The cause, being the pressure to meet unrealistic targets for time and work. Disclaimer, this is a very vanilla and broken-down event, and we didn't really complete a great example of a full 5-why but I think you get the point.?The point is the root cause here is the pressures management has placed on the workers to meet targets.?In order to meet those targets workers felt they needed to take shortcuts in order to get it done.?Feeling safe doing so, they proceeded even knowing it wasn't the properly secured.
Mark came to find, Skid Row isn't just a drug problem.?We see, that this incident isn't just a ladder securing problem.? Our employers are spending a significant amount of time and resources on the wrong problems.??
We are spending time and money on: blaming and re-training, new policies, new labels, in some cases new employees.
We are spending less time and money on: a healthy understanding of job expectations, overall mental health, our management systems, good and effective training, developing bad bosses and poor performers.
We are all being asked to do more with less.?Its a problem we're never going to get away from.?Our management wants us to save money, reduce risk and foster a healthy workforce coupled with low budgets, demanding timelines regulatory pressures etc.?If they really want to do that then it requires giving you the resources and most importantly, the empowerment to do things the right way, not the easy way.?Push back when you don't see root causes being addressed. Check yourself in making?sure you aren't falling victim to less than adequate correctives.?Above all remember that we are here to protect and advocate for the environment, our workers and their families.?