The Rise of The Safety Extremist

By Phil La Duke

 

“’Isms’ in my opinion are not good”
—Ferris Bueller, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off 

fa·nat·ic (fuh-nat-ik) noun

1. a person with an extreme and uncritical enthusiasm or zeal, as in religion or politics.

ex·trem·ist (ik-stree-mist) noun

1. a person who goes to extremes, especially in political matters.
2. a supporter or advocate of extreme doctrines or practices.

I write provocative material.  I deliberately try to elicit a visceral response and take people to a place where they can explore their deepest held beliefs and question basic ideologies of safety. The latest in neuroscience suggests that our decisions or made and our ability to change reside deep in our subconscious beneath our defenses. When something strikes a nerve at that level it can be difficult to  have a rational conversation, but in general, if one can at least reconsider one’s belief set maybe its worth it.

Why is it important to reexamine our deepest held beliefs? Because the world is a dynamic place and if our beliefs are static we become increasingly out of touch.  If we cling blindly to our beliefs and lash out to anyone who threatens our worldview then we run the risk of becoming completely and dangerously out of touch with the realities of your profession and become a useless relic.  That should be career suicide, but sadly even the most out of touch hacks can usually find work based on their years and years of experience.  But what good is 40.2 years of experience if that experience consists chiefly of self-congratulatory affirmations and retreads of theories that are a century old.

Not that every new idea is a good one.  There is as much crap spewed by the idea d’jour pundits today as there ever has been. And just because an idea or theory is new doesn’t make it any better than conventional wisdom, but it’s important that any professional consider new ideas and emerging thought with an open mind.

That’s getting tougher and tougher to do in safety, owing to the rise in extremist thought in safety. The merest suggestion that we discard a safety truism is likely to to create nothing short of a public out rage.  Take for instance the response to Heinrich’s Pyramid.  A recent thread on the social networking site LinkedIn elicited 3,186 comments ranging from the intellectually bantering to the crackpot personal attacks. The thread quoted a recent assertion by EHS Today:

“Heinrich’s assertion that 88% of accidents are the result of unsafe acts has been dismissed as something he just made up. There was no research behind it whatsoever. “ and asked the simple question “What’s your opinion? And why?”

According to a recent article by Ashley Johnson in H+S Magazine a poll the magazine conducted found that 86% of respondents believed either completely or somewhat in Heinrich’s theories, while another 10% reporting that they weren’t familiar with Heinrich’s theories.  The article is a scathing indictment of Heinrich’s theories from experts who question his methods, his conclusions, and generally speaking nearly everything had to say.  The article was balanced by a half-hearted defense that the numbers were never meant to be statistical predictors (the were, by the way) and that Heinrich never blamed the workers (he did. In fact Heinrich was a devotee of eugenics and believed that one’s race and ethnicity played a factor in the likelihood that a worker would be injured or cause an injury to other.)

The What does this all have to do with extremism? Plenty.  This demonstrates that  despite a growing body of evidence that deeply held belief will hold sway.  This in itself is not extremism, but it does create an environment where extremists thrive.  Why do people cling to beliefs that are refuted (there are still people who deeply believe in fake photos and film footage of the Loch Ness Monster and Big Foot, even though the perpetrators of these hoaxes[1])? People tend to want to believe in what they’re doing and when people chip away at the foundation.

Its not just the Heinrich supporters who will lash out against any suggestion that doesn’t support their world view.  If you don’t believe me just publish something critical about Behavior Based Safety.  Within hours extremists and fanatics will marshal their forces and begin attacking you.  The problem has grown to such an extent that several editors of leading safety magazines actively avoid the debate more out of a desire to avoid arguing with fanatics than out of fear or intimidation.  But intimidation of the press is a goal of extremists everywhere —from Al Quida to the Ku Klux Klan to the Neo Nazis to the safety extremists—is to discredit, attack, intimidate, and generally silence the media which, if it is truly unbiased—will never buy there bill of goods.

Extremism Is Rooted In Fear

Let’s suppose you have 40.2 years of experience in safety where you served with distinction, and someone comes along and asserts something contrary to the foundation on which your entire experience is predicated.  What happens to your credentials and accomplishments and very identity as a safety professional when all on which it is built crumbles? People will protect their beliefs with a wildness typically reserved for mother grizzlies defending their cubs; they will make ugly personal attacks and seek to gather together like-minded souls close to them.

Extremism Loves Company

Social networking sites make it easy to reach out to a world of people. Some credit social networking with ushering in Arab Spring, but it also has a darker side.  Social Networking affords us the opportunity for the fanatics to get their ideas out to a sympathetic ear. Unfortunately, when it comes to safety, people are dying in the workplace while crackpots are postulating theories that are given equal weight with responsible theorists in safety.  I will leave the readers to decide which slide of the equation on which I fall.

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[1] I’m speaking of the most famous loch ness monster photo and the actual film footage of a reputed big foot. The very people who first produced them convincingly disproved both of these.  If you want to believe in the Loch Ness monster or Big Foot God bless you, but what was the most compelling evidence has been disproven. And don’t even get me started on crop circles.

Filed under: Behavior Based Safety, Phil La Duke, Safety, Safety Culture, Worker Safety, closed-minded safety professionals, Criticisms of BBS, Criticisms of Heinrich's Pyramid, extremism, Heinrich Pyramid, organizational change

Fraidy Cats: Is Fear Jeopardizing Worker Safety?

by Phil La Duke

“The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself”—Franklin D. Roosevelt

FDR famously said, “the only thing we have to fear, is fear itself”.  That was easy for him to say, as president during the Great Depression and World War II he was probably the most heavily guarded man in the western hemisphere. Even so, I think he might have been on to something.

Now we have the Great Recession, and the malingering global economy has created, in many workplaces, a pervasive climate of fear. Now we’re afraid of Cyprus for crying out loud,  Honestly, until about a month ago, I wasn’t completely sure Cyprus was still around, I mean, when exactly did Turkey and Greece stop fighting over it? Finding out that the fate of Cyprian banks could break up the European Union is a bit like waking up tomorrow to find that Malta has obtained nuclear weapons and has decided to become a rogue nation state.  Possible? Sure. Something to be afraid of? Not really.  But one thing we can all agree on is that the economic uncertainty has created a lot of fear in the workplace, and fear can undermine worker safety in many ways. So unless we understand the nature and origins of this fear, we can never implement effective countermeasures.

Fear of Being Injured

Certainly a big fear in the workplace today, especially among older workers, is the fear that one will suffer a career ending injury.  Many people believe that getting injured will not only jeopardize their existing job, but also make it more difficult to find a new job should they become unemployed.  For other workers, there is a real fear that if they raise an issue about safety the employer is likely to move the operations overseas in search of a more relaxed safety standard and a government more sympathetic to companies. These workers are far less likely to balk when asked to do something that is unreasonable risky.

Recently a large manufacturing operation had a hypothesis: layoffs would increase injury claims (mostly fraudulent) as workers preferred to go on disability rather than on unemployment. They did a small study and were surprised by the results. Instances of injury claims (and most notably fraud) decreased. But under recording of injuries skyrocketed. The reason? Workers feared that an injury on their record would make them more likely to be laid off, and what’s more, a medical leave would make it far more difficult to find employment elsewhere if they did lose their jobs. Of course this is only a single example, and one study does not a trend make, but it convinced me, and it convinced my customer.

Fear of Reporting Injuries

Speaking of manufacturers, I was recently on a plane with a supervisor at a very large steel manufacturer.  The manufacturer has been under the gun to reduce its injuries owing, in part, to several fatalities and severe injuries.  The solution? Anyone who gets injured gets a five-day suspension until they can determine whether or not the worker was at fault.  This had the not surprising result of significantly lowering reported injuries.  Workers can’t afford to lose five days pay so they go to their own physicians.  All the while, some block-headed regional safety director takes credit for making the work place safer. When they kill someone, and they WILL kill someone, I hope they put him in a hole so deep even the other convicts will avoid it.  This mouth breather has found a way to make himself look good, improve his record, and impress the executives, but scaring the beejeezus out of the workers.  Yes, there are still these neanderthals working in safety and yes, there are still executives who praise them for not taking any shit from these “so-called, injured workers”/

There are other cases where the fear of reporting injuries can manifest in unexpected ways. In some environments, where a single injury can spoil the safety BINGO or even cost coworkers a quarterly bonus, not only is the fear present its palpable and reasonable. Its unwise to mess with someone’s paycheck in the best economic time, but in a recession it can be downright dangerous.

Fear of Uncertainty

I’m no economist, nor do I play one on television (although I do occasionally lie to women in bars about being one) but I believe the single biggest influencer in lack of consumer confidence was the “share the pain” craze of the last five years. Time was where when their was a downturn the company laid of 10% of the workforce, and the walking wounded who were left behind licked their proverbial wounds and then got back to work. We mourned our dear departed and then went back to our daily routine. But the practice of forced furloughs, unpaid shut downs and other economic chicanery left everyone wondering when the axe would fall. Faced with a feeling of impending doom workers everywhere stopped spending in anticipation of a layoff that would never come. Reductions in staff hurt, but the pain quickly fades. This constant state of fear and worry creates stress and stress, worry, and fear increases our mistakes. The next time someone at your company suggests we “share the pain” you should suggest extinguishing a cigarette in their left eye; if that isn’t painful enough, do both eyes.

Fear As A Performance Influencer

In the Just Culture philosophy they talk about the inevitability of human error. Everyone makes mistakes to err is human, blah blah blah. Even while we can’t prevent people from making mistakes, we CAN increase the likelihood of making mistakes and bad decisions. The things that make things worse—harder to focus, more difficult to think, and make it easier to make mistakes—are fairly easy to identify. Fatigue, stress, worry, distraction, and yes, fear. In these cases the frightened worker is markedly more likely to omit a key step, take a dangerous shortcut, or otherwise increase his or her likelihood of injuring him/herself or others.

An automobile manufacturer with whom I worked saw a strong correlation between employee assistance line calls and injuries. Judging from their data, the safety leadership inferred a strong relationship between people who were worked up about something and injuries and near misses. They may be guilty of causefusion (attributing cause and effect to situations where only a correlation exists) but they believed that they were seeing these performance influencers inaction. As the economic slowdown turned into The Great Recession, both the calls to the hotline AND injury levels stayed flat, but the nature of the calls changed. Instead of calling with job related issues, more and more of the workers called about problems outside the workplace. Problems with coworkers or supervisors were replaced by worries of foreclosures and other financial concerns.

Fear of Loss of Livelihood

Fear of job loss and the subsequent financial consequences can increase the likelihood of workplace violence, as well. Studies in the causes of the postal shootings found a correlation between fear of job loss and the outbreak of the shooting. Postal workers were constantly threatened with the loss of their jobs while at the same time reminded that their limited education and background made it highly unlikely that they would ever have it as good as they had it at the post office. Whether or not these statements were true, workers believed them and when faced with nothing else to lose a handful of mentally ill workers reacted violently.

When fear is replaced by a feeling of fatefulness bad things are going to happen. Companies can only push workers (from the executive suite to the rank and file) so far before the system breaks down and bad things start to happen.

Filed under: Behavior Based Safety, Injury reporting, Just Culture, Phil La Duke, Fear, fear as a risk factor, fraidy cats, worker fear

When It Comes To Unsafe Behaviors There’s Plenty Of Blame to Go Around

By Phil La Duke

If you’ve made even the most cursory read of my articles and blogs you probably already know that I don’t hold much stock in Behavior Based Safety (BBS).  I believe that except for the odd statistical outlier nut-job, nobody WANTS to get hurt and unless they were designed my the Marquis De Sade you processes aren’t intended to hurt people.  If those two things are true no amount of behavior modification—whether it be incentive programs or telling people to be more careful—is going to change much of anything.  But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe unsafe behavior is the single largest cause of injuries, and if so, we have to manage those behaviors.

Before we can manage unsafe behaviors we have to understand the context in which the behaviors occur.  We can’t take effective action unless we understand precisely why people behaved in an unsafe manner.  A couple of days ago an acquaintance told me about how he had been injured on the job during the third week of February on two consecutive years (he was nervously praying for the first of March to come so he could relax a bit).  “It was my own fault,” he explained, “I was rushing to get things done because my boss was standing over my shoulder saying ‘we gotta get this order out’”.  Unsafe behavior? sure;  the fault of the worker? I don’t think so. Most traditional BBS programs focus on the unsafe behaviors of workers. Productivity is sapped as millions of hours are wasted insisting that supervisors watch people work and coach them on their unsafe behaviors.  Don’t the people whose unsafe decisions and insistence and encouragement of unsafe behaviors bear any culpability in worker injuries? I think they should.

Here are some incredibly unsafe behaviors (attitudes + action) up-stream in the process that organizations need to address:

• “I Don’t Care How; Just Get It Done.” Whether it’s manufacturing, or construction, or mining or oil and gas there are supervisors, and site managers, and even executives who reward the people who ignore safety protocols and procedure to “get things done”.  This sends a strong message to the workers: you will get rewarded for violating the rules.  Ask these leaders about this behavior and you will likely get a sermon on how they will never tolerate unsafe work and a worker has a right to go home in the same condition…blah, blah, blah.  But when the rubber hits the road and they are faced with falling behind schedule and giving a nod-and-wink “work safe” while telling the workers that the job must get done by Thursday at all costs.  Workers aren’t stupid; they know that they can take risks and nine times out of ten nothing bad will happen.  They understand that probability favors them not getting hurt and if they “get the job done” they will be seen—and more importantly treated—like heroes.  It’s the guys who get things done who get promoted, get the plum assignments, and get fat raises.  They will take unnecessary risks because they are rewarded for doing so, while the people who work safely are punished.  A pizza party at the end of the month for zero loss time injuries can’t compete with the raises, opportunities, and job security afford to those who “get things done”.
• “I Don’t Care If the Safety Rule Makes It Impossible to Do the Job You Must Follow The Rule.” This behavior is most prevalent among the “command and control” safety professionals who neither know, nor care to know how the work is done.  It’s an ignorance borne out of laziness.  Workers are told they can’t do the job in the most expeditious and efficient manner because doing so is unsafe, are given an unworkable solution, and an expectation to perform to standard. Faced with this choice they take unjustifiable risks, and why wouldn’t they? We can cluck our tongues at the violations of the workers but really whose unsafe behavior is truly to blame for the hazardous situation?
• “What Can I DO? I Can’t Make Them Work Safely.” In the grand scheme of things there is no such thing as working completely safely.  Sure we can work in ways in which we minimize our risk but even the best set of rules can only protect us from hazards that have been anticipated. It’s tough to anticipate every conceivable hazard in a dynamic and rapidly changing environment.  Too many safety professionals act like institutional eunuchs, trumpeting their emasculation to anyone they think might listen.  The lack of a safe behavior can be the same as an unsafe one.  When safety professionals or supervisors turn a blind eye toward hazards—behavioral or physical—the effect is every bit as dangerous as the unsafe act itself.
• “I Don’t Have Time”. The lack of time has become the rallying cry for every aspiring martyr. Where the quality of a person’s work was once the measure of his or her performance now, in many organizations, bellyaching about how little time you have has become the new hallmark of an employee’s contribution.  I have heard so many safety professionals, supervisors, and operations managers whine about their lack of time to get everything done that I involuntarily roll my eyes when I hear it.  What am I supposed to do with that information? Praise you for doing a half-assed job? Sympathize because you can’t manage up? Studies have shown that people tend to do work in the following order: tasks they enjoy, tasks that are easy, tasks that are fun, and then everything else.  If you don’t have time for safety—from the maintenance managers who can’t find the time to maintain equipment or repair facility issues to the safety person who can’t find the time to do a proper incident investigation to the materials manager who doesn’t have time to get stock out of the aisle ways, to the site manager who padlocks emergency exits because he doesn’t have time to discipline the people who are using it inappropriately, to the supervisor who doesn’t have time to inspect the work area to ensure it is free of hazards—you need to either reprioritize your work or get out before someone get’s killed.
• “They Wouldn’t Get Hurt If they would Be More Careful.” Blaming the injured is a staple of many Safety Management systems. I have heard safety professionals describe workers who have suffered repeat injuries “frequent flyers” and plant managers insist that workers are hurt “primarily because they take short cuts to get more ass time”.  I have heard that safety is everyone’s job so many times that I want to vomit.  If safety truly is everyone’s job then where is the culpability for those of us who make decisions who jeopardize the safety of others?

So maybe behavior is a key component in worker safety, and maybe we bear some responsibility for our own behavior.  If safety truly is everyone’s job than there is blood on our hands every time someone gets injured on our watch.  We bear as much of the responsibility for the gore and carnage as anyone. Maybe it’s time we take a hard look at OUR behavior before we start pointing fingers of shame at the injured worker.  Maybe it’s time for us to ask ourselves what did we do TODAY to help worker’s make safe decisions? Maybe it’s time to turn the lens of judgment on ourselves and ask what we could have done to prevent the injury that took the life of a coworker, and how we will change our OWN behavior to help workers make better, safer choices from now on.

Filed under: Behavior Based Safety, Phil La Duke, Risk, 88% of injuries caused by unsafe behavior, At risk behavior, Behavior Based Safety, improving worker safety, Safety, The myth of 95% of injuries are caused by unsafe behaviors, Worker Safety

Real Men (and Women) Report Injuries

By Phil La Duke

It’s starts early in our lives: “Don’t be a baby”, “Stop crying, you’re all right”. It continues through our childhood, “Toughen up, you pansy” or “walk it off”. Even when we’re adults were told to “man up” or “play through the pain”.  At a very basic level we are conditioned to see injuries as weakness, as some sign of inferiority.  Heck even the dumbest predators target the weak and the injured among their prey. And yet organizations expect us to ignore a lifetime of conditioning and openly admit our mistakes, injuries, skills deficiencies, and weaknesses. We reward and revere the strong, the burly, the toughest among us.  They are the carry over from the warrior class, knights, samurai, and warlords.  For centuries a person’s power came largely from their physical brawn and his or her ability to withstand physical punishment and survive. This is the world in which we are trying to find ways to get people to report injuries.

What makes matters worse are the many “blame the worker” programs that reward those fortunate enough to avoid injuries and punish those who are less fortunate (the withholding of a reward is a de facto punishment, after all). Talk to any safety professional about why his or her injury rates are rising and you are likely to quickly get into discussions about poor case management and fraudulent injuries. Even safety professionals aren’t immune for showing disdain for the slowest gazelles in their particular herd.  We—everyone in the organization—are better than these ten-thumbed dolts who trip over themselves, do stupid things, and violate policy. Most of us are disgusted by these clumsy oafs for spoiling our safety records; they deserve to get hurt. Oh sure, none of us will say it out loud—our world is far to politically correct for that —but deep down, most of us believe that somehow we would not have shared the fate of the injured worker.

One’s ability to silently suffer injuries without making too much fuss about it is celebrated by society, scars are badges of honor, and the more harrowing the injury the greater the status bestowed on the injured.  Remember the scene in Jaws where captain Quint and Hooper are swapping stories about their injuries? Both trying to one up the other, with broad smiles of nostalgia for their injuries; contentedly remembering not the pain of the injury, but the stalwart way in which they endured it.  Not once did they mention their own culpability in the injury (how their injuries were caused seemed insignificant) rather they reveled in the heroic way they took it with out complaint.

Attempts to provide some sort of bonus for zero-injury workdays reinforce this conditioning. If you can take the pain long enough to get treated by your own physician you not only grow in the estimation of your peers but you’re more the hero because you saved the safety BINGO, or the bonus, or the pizza party.

Deconditioning a lifetime where we have been taught that the measure of a man is his ability to take more punishment than his peers isn’t easy.  In fact, reconditioning the workforce to believe that they have a responsibility for reporting injuries so that it can save others (who might not be as tough)  can be damned hard.  So what can be done? Plenty:

• Institute an aggressive problem solving training program.  Problem solving that focuses on areas where the system could fail and result in injuries reduces hazards without threatening the idea that tough as nails, hard-scrabble men are somehow expected to become simpering school girls.  Problem solving allows workers to keep their pride and puts a positive spin on injury prevention. It’s not about how tough someone is, it’s about how smart a person is, and how good he/she is at solving problems on the job.
• Reinforce training with structured conditioning.  Think it terms of sports, or military training.  It’s not enough to teach the person what they need to do know to accomplish a task, but the person needs to compete the task over and over until the task is hardwired into the person’s brain. The task needs to become part of the person’s muscle memory.  The conditioning will happen with or without your guidance, but unguided conditioning is more likely to hardwire poor practices than it is to produce a safer workplace.
• Focus on hazard elimination and not on injury prevention.  People are far more likely to tell you about something that COULD hurt people than about something that DID hurt people.  Focusing on identifying, containing, and correcting hazards is more about process and less about the soft side of safety.
• Make it clear that injury prevention is about saving money.  It stark terms the company doesn’t give one whit about how tough a worker is, how much a worker doesn’t need to use a lift assist, or how much punishment a worker can take. Companies care about money; and unsafe work conditions and practices subject the company to unjustifiable financial risk.  A worker may be able to slap a Band-Aid on a cut worthy of stitches, but the company doesn’t empower that worker to risk infection or some other complication that is likely to cost the company money.
• Reinforce the desired mindset continually.  The mindset that it’s laudable to get hurt, that it’s somehow a badge of honor or a right of passage can’t be changed by assailing it head on. Instead, safety professionals need to position reporting injuries for what it is: an important part of managing risk and doing business more effectively.  After all, a more efficient workplace means job security.

Our conditioning to suffer in silence, to stoically toil at our jobs and say nothing in complaint is deeply ingrained into our collective psyche, and mere training or behavior modification isn’t likely to move the dial (figuratively speaking). But if we approach things a bit differently we can make real strides in changing the way workers think about safety.

We need to recondition the workforce so that workers can do their jobs without harming themselves. This will require not only physical conditioning, but mental, and behavioral conditioning as well.

 

Filed under: Behavior Based Safety, Phil La Duke, Safety, conditioning, conditioning and safety, hardwiring safety, Phil La Duke, work hardening, Worker Safety

Pulling Safety Out Of Its Rut: The Value of A Different Look At Safety

By Phil La Duke

Let’s be clear, there is no such thing as a safe workplace. Sure we can slap each other on the back and brag to one another about the four years without a recordable injury and we can tell ourselves that we have achieved a Utopian risk free workplace but the reality is, there is always some probability that a worker will be harmed in the course of doing his or her job.

While the level of success in lowering the risk of injuries varies from organization to organization, its fair to say that we can all do better. (For you smug “I haven’t had an injury in my organization in 23 years” readers, I say look harder, do you have near misses? First aid cases? If you think the answer to those questions is “no” you are delusional. You might as well stop reading, because you will never understand the error of your ways until your next fatality; and believe me one is coming.) The problem isn’t just in the way we view safety, it’s also in the fact that for about 30 years the view of safety has remained largely unchallenged.  Consensus thinking on a complex problem leads to a convoluted mess, and in this case safety vendors—both the well meaning and the snake-oil salesmen—capitalize on the confusion to carve out lucrative livelihoods. When people make their livings off the status quo, they aren’t highly motivated to make substantive changes. In fact, most will fight like pumas to preserve their intellectual turf.

The problem with the same old thinking is that it implies that we have forever solved the problem. It’s as if safety is a static problem when in fact, safety is dynamic; every time there is a change in the workplace (which is constant—if nothing else every piece of equipment is getting older. Parts where out, workers get older and aren’t as physically capable as they were the day before. Without intervention, everything in the workplace is becoming more and more risky. Applying a static solution to a dynamic problem lies at the heart of disaster. Too many organizations miss this fact as they pursue improved worker safety. The approach most organizations take to making the workplace safer hasn’t really changed in the last 30 (if not 100 years). Effectively the solution is to modify the workers such that they are better able to interact with workplace hazards.

 “Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.”—Albert Einstein

If there is to be any sort of important, transformational innovation in workplace safety we have to think differently and explore radically different methods for reducing workplace risk; in short, we have to view safety in a revolutionary new way; we have to think differently.

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” —Albert Einstein

I understand that many of you don’t see the problem, after all, things are getting better—injuries are down, fatalities are flat, and in general the workplace seems safer, or at very least safe enough.  But people still get hurt on the job, people still die in industrial accidents. So perhaps you should consider that another approach is necessary.

“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.”—Albert Einstein

It’s tempting to think that if we are getting good results doing what were doing then there is no real reason to change; if it aint broke, don’t fix it.  But emerging technology, slackening protections for workers, and socioeconomic changes relative to the business climate combine to create a drastically different workplace than we have previously experienced. We need to worry less about the procedural, less about the logical and more about the possible.

“Think Different”—Steven Jobs

Co-founder of Apple, Steven Jobs has had the greatest impact on our lives since Thomas Edison. When he returned to Apple he adopted the slogan, “Think Different”.  Others at Apple protested, “Think Different” they argued was grammatically incorrect, and should rightfully read “think differently, or think ‘different’”.  But Jobs had a specific meaning in mind. He wanted people to think “different”. Not differently from the way they were currently thinking, although that was certainly part of it. No, Jobs saw the credo as a call for thinking that was tangibly out of the mainstream. It was almost as he was calling for a visualization of exactly what the manifestation of what “different” looks like. It was more than a challenge; it was the defiant sneer of a mind that would change the world. If ever there was a place where thinking “different” is needed, it is in the world of worker safety.

Okay…So What?

It’s easy to hammer out a thousand words or so on the need for us to look beyond the traditional in worker safety, but without specifics how useful is the advice?  While the need for change in safety is considerable, the most critical changes need to come in these areas:

• The Role of The Safety Professional.  Seeing the safety professional as the wizened old mage who is the arbiter of all things safety is outmoded.  Whether these sages are policemen or consultants, it’s time to imagine a completely different safety function. One where the decision making relative to safety isn’t housed in the safety office to be meted out by the safety engineer, rather where knowledge is widely distributed throughout population and decision-making regarding safety resides with empowered workers at all levels.
• The View of Behavior As Causation.  Yes, unsafe behavior gets people injured and killed, but the BBS pundits have got to stop acting as if they have discovered the God Particle.  There is a dearth of understanding of sociology, neurology, brain function, group dynamics, anthropology, and even psychology underpinning too many BBS “solutions” (the only solutions offered by many BBS systems is to keep the providers well feed with full pockets). The question isn’t whether or not unsafe behaviors create heightened risk of injuries, but whether or not we can influence those behaviors to the extent that it will lower the risk of injuries.  If you considers other problems associated with populations—crime, poverty, war, etc.—governments haven’t had much luck solving these problems by modifying individuals behaviors; what makes us think we can be more successful in worker safety?
• The View of Safety As A Discrete Element.  Trying to managing safety in a vacuum, that is, without considering Quality, Delivery, Cost, Morale, and Environment is like herding cats.  If you don’t treat the efficiency of your organization holistically, you will most likely shift problems from one area of the company to another.
• Prevention. A couple of weeks ago I posted “Requiem for Prevention”. In that piece I talked at length about how we needed to siphon some of the effort that we currently put into prevention and refocus it on protecting workers when prevention fails.  We need to radically reinvent our view of prevention and how to balance it with contingency planning.
• Treating Injuries As Somehow Different From Other Process Failures.  Safety professionals need to be re-envisioned as problem solvers and process improvement specialists; as utility players on the team. Safety professionals should be capable of making improvements across the SQDCME spectrum; more generalist and less specialized.
• The View of Safety As A Sacred Calling.  Yes, safety is the right thing to do, sure it’s moral, yes…blah, blah, blah…admit it; we don’t save lives. We aren’t doctors, we aren’t searching for a cure for cancer.  The best we can hope to claim is that we might have saved a life in the course of our careers. We need to stop elevating what we do above the jobs of those we serve.

“You May Say I’m A Dreamer, But I’m Not The Only One”—John Lennon

I realize that a good number of you are bristling about what you’ve read here.  That uneasiness you’re feeling is the first stage to opening your mind.  You need to open your mind and stare into the abyss, because if you don’t you have no capacity to change. Those who have no capacity to change and adapt are on the express train to extinction. Open your mind, if you leave us too soon you’ll be missed.

Filed under: Behavior Based Safety, Safety, Safety Culture, A second Look at Safety, “Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.”—Albert Einstein, “Think Different”—Steven Jobs, BBS, Behavior Based Safety, Behaviour Based Safety

Requiem For Prevention

by Phil La Duke

I am a loud (some might say obnoxious) and ardent supporter of prevention.  In fact, I one of my core values is “Prevention is the key to sustainable safety.” So given my vocal advocacy of prevention, you might be surprised to learn that I believe that in many cases prevention has gone overboard and that in many cases companies would be better served by doing LESS prevention and more contingent planning.  Heresy? Consider the  organization that spends tens of thousands of dollars each year preventing accidents that would likely have little or no chance of ever happening.  These companies have 20-person safety committees that meet once a week to argue about why an over-burdened maintenance department hasn’t fixed a low-priority hazardous condition.

Prevention costs money and resources that may well be better spent elsewhere in the organization—and not necessarily safety. Equally damning, organizations that continue funding convoluted safety bureaucracies that unnecessarily add heads, complexity, and cost in the name of preventing injuries.  Too often these efforts focus on one of the most misunderstood sources of injuries in the workplace today: human behavior. These systems seldom deliver what they promise (that is, a sustainable change in human behavior) and can actually impede important business processes and the delivery of goods or services in the misguided attempt to control human behavior; it can’t be done, so stop trying.

I’m not suggesting that we return to reactive safety practices, far from it.  What I am saying is that there is a time and a place for prevention, but its is not a panacea.  Simply put, you can’t prevent every accident, and in some cases you should be looking for ways to protect workers when your best efforts to prevent an accident fails INSTEAD of wasting time on prevention.

Variation in Human Behavior

As organizations, we’d all like to think that we hire smart, capable people, and for the most part we do.  We spend days (and thousands of dollars) screening candidates: we ask them probing questions to find out how they reason, how they solve problems, and how they think.  We do background checks and ask professional references whether or not the candidate is worth offering them a position.  We screen the candidate for illicit drug use, criminal misdeeds, and the things in life that indicate that whether or not the candidate has sound judgment. In the end we confidently hire the candidate and invest time and money training the new hire so that he or she can meaningfully contribute.  And then it happens.  The person that we spent so much time screening and training gets hurt and we think to ourselves, “if only that idiot would have…”  Huh? Now because the employee got hurt he/she’s suddenly an idiot?  You may read this and think that you are immune to such thoughts, but the majority of the people I hear describing injured workers as idiots are safety professionals.

They Call Them Accidents For A Reason

As much as we would like to assign accountability for injuries, the fact remains that in almost all cases whatever happened to injure the person was unintentional, or at very least, the person who committed the unsafe act didn’t fully comprehend the potential consequences of his or her actions; the accident was an unintended outcome; in short, the injury was an accident.  Accepting that things will go wrong, that people make mistakes, is a bitter pill to swallow.  We are taught to believe that making mistakes are bad, subject to punishment, and indicative of poor judgment or out-and-out stupidity. But everyone makes mistakes—we learn by trial and error and without mistakes there can be no learning, at least not organic learning that lasts.

Everyone Makes Mistakes, But No One Should Have To Die Because of A Mistake

I’ve read (I can’t remember where) that the average person makes 5 mistakes an hour. Multiply that by the 2080 hours in the average work year and you have a boat load of mistakes.  Some theorize that because biologically speaking change is reckless and dangerous (nature tends to have a “if it aint broke don’t fix it’ approach to survival; if a species is thriving it resists change.  In fact, change is so dangerous, that our bodies are hardwired to resist it, when we are confronted with change it triggers our flight/fight response and causes us stress.  Conversely, species that are unable to change are unable to adapt to changes in their environments and are driven to extinction.  So it would appear that we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t.  But if the research that found that the human brain will make 5 mistakes an hour is correct what possible advantage would there be in these mistakes?  Making tiny subconscious, non-cognitive mistakes could be our brain’s way of testing the environment by disrupting our routines in small ways.  If the mistake leads us to a better way of living we make serendipitous discoveries and innovations but if the mistake leads to an undesirable outcome we see it as an error. But in both cases our brains learn about the safety of deviating from its routine and we are better able to safely adapt.

Variation Leads To Errors

Experts in quality, particularly in manufacturing, cannot emphasis the danger of process variation strongly enough; when the process varies things go sour very quickly.  Manufacturing and process engineers have made huge strides in reducing mechanical variation, but the variation endemic to human behavior is so pervasive that it’s all but impossible to eliminate it, or substantially reduce it.  Outside of the military (and quasi military—police, security, etc.) it is very difficult to control human behavior.  Even variation in cognitive behavior is difficult; how many companies have problems with poor attendance? Certainly at least some of the causes of absenteeism are cognitive decisions where the offending employee simply chose not to come to work.

Focus On Contingency Not Prevention

Okay, relax.  I know that I preach prevention above all things, but when it comes to variation in human  behavior you just can’t prevent most of it. If we could there would be no crime, no traffic accidents, and no medical malpractice.  And to make things even more complicated, human behavior can be very tricky to predict, and even more difficult to prevent.  We have to stop pretending that all our problems can be solved through preventive measures; sometimes—despite our best efforts—things go sideways and when they do we had ought to have some contingency in place to prevent a mishap from becoming a disaster or a tragedy.  When it comes to contingency versus prevention it doesn’t have to be an either or decision.  I used to teach problem solving and we used a very simple tool for determining whether to use a preventive countermeasure or a contingency countermeasure.  We would rate both the probability and severity of an error in terms of high, medium, or low.  If the probability that the particular failure mode (engineering speak for a screw up) is high—in other words it is almost certain to happen under the given circumstances—then one should definitely find a preventive action.  If the probability is low (fairly remote, but possible) one would need to temper the response after considering the time and money it would require to implement.  Similarly, if the failure mode’s severity was high (if it DID happen the consequences would be severe) than one would have a contingency in place to protect workers, property, and inventory.  Of course if the severity was expected to be low one would again determine whether the protection offered would be worth the cost of the required resources.

Because one rates the severity separately from the probability, one ends up with two scores that must be considered together.  Certainly if the probability is high AND the severity is high one would implement both preventive and contingency controls.  On the other end of the spectrum, if both the probability and severity were low, one would likely only take action if the countermeasures were cheap and easy to implement. But the scores that are in between (medium probability and low severity, etc.) are subject to a lot more judgment-based decision making. This may seem like a serious weakness to some, but on the contrary, this subjectivity allows an organization to customize it’s countermeasures to its unique environment and situation.

It would be great if we could accurately predict and prevent injuries, but the reality is we can’t. We have to be pragmatic and take important steps to ensure that when someone does have an accident, protections are in place to keep the injury from becoming life altering or fatal.

Filed under: Behavior Based Safety, Loss Prevention, Phil La Duke, Safety, accident prevention, Attitudes toward safety, Behavior Based Safety, contingencies for safety, Criticisms of BBS, culture change, focus on prevention

When it Comes to Safety the Surest Way to Lose Is to Think You’ve Won

 

By Phil La Duke

Injury rates are down, the safety function is running like a well-oiled machine and senior leadership is happy, so now you can relax right? Wrong.  If safety is the probability of injuries and we know that the risk of injury is never zero, then most of us understand that we have to remain vigilant in our efforts to create a workplace with the lowest possible risk…blah, blah, blah. But realistically do we really need to keep trying new initiatives after we have licked the biggest hitters in safety? Isn’t that just some academic argument? Well, yes and no.  In some cases, we truly can wind down some of our safety efforts.  After all, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to be hyper-vigilant in workplaces where most of our hazards are well managed and quickly contained or corrected—that’s like continuing to look for your car keys after you’ve already found them (“where else MIGHT they have been but weren’t?”) Unfortunately, most of us aren’t working for organizations that are quite there yet and still have some work to do.

In fact, it’s highly unlikely that we will ever get there.  We tend to think as safety (and other business systems) as its own system when, in fact, all our business systems are interconnected in highly complex ways.  What’s worse is that all our business systems operate in a dynamic business climate and this continuously changing environment makes it impossible for us to ever pronounce the workplace permanently “safe”.

Acclimation

When we are confronted with a new situation we generally feel nervous, or tentative, or unsafe in some way.  Even the boldest among us is likely to exercise heighted care when first confronted with a new situation, but as we get used to the situation we become more comfortable. We acclimate to the changes and feel more comfortable taking what a less seasoned observer might describe as unwarranted or even reckless. This same process of acclimation that allows us to perform our jobs with greater levels of skill also puts us at higher levels of risk.

Over Confidence and Complacency

Many organizations fail to recognize that the hazards shift and evolve.  These organizations, reckoning that they have solved the safety puzzle become less vigilant.  It’s a dangerous phenomenon.  Hazards insidiously grow while the perception of danger diminishes, leaving the organization open to unexpected catastrophe. Some of you may be skeptical; it’s often difficult to accept that you may be losing ground when all indications are to the contrary. But as long as the work environment changes and your safety management system stays the same, you are at significant risk.  And the kinds of catastrophes that strike seem to come out of nowhere.

Turnover

A key source of variation in organizations is turn over.  We talk a lot about the effects of employee turnover on the safety organizations (well at least I talk a lot about it) but one of the most destructive changes to the organization is executive turnover.  Executive turnover can throw the vision of the organization into a tailspin, but even moderate turnover at the middle of the organization can change the environment enough to cause variation sufficient to pose a significant hazard to the workplace.

 Disruptive Technology

A prime driver for change in an organization is disruptive technology.  Clayton M. Christensen Harvard Business School professor coined the term “Disruptive Technology” to describe a new technology that unexpectedly displaces an established technology. Most companies are successful because they have mastered sustaining technologies.  But disruptive technologies introduce hazards far beyond the changes brought by the technology itself.  Disruptive technology generally produces ripple effects that, owing to the organization’s lack of experience and familiarity with the nuanced nature of the new technology, can manifest in lethal hazards.

Drift

Drift is the natural tendency to move away from a standard or a norm.  When we drift we tend to believe that risks are justifiable and fairly benign—like driving a car and thinking yourself safe even though statistically the faster we drive and the longer we drive we will make dozens of poor choices, risky choices and errors.  Our subconscious minds experiment with ways in which we can drift from the norm; it makes us make mistakes to test the safety of quickly moving from one environment to the next. This process allows us to quickly adapt when our survival depends on it, but it also subjects us to the risk of injuries.

All these factors—from acclimation to drift—build to put us in harms way.  But the biggest thing we have to fear, isn’t, as FDR once said, “fear itself”, but the absence of fear.  We are often most at risk when we believe ourselves to be “safest”.

Filed under: Behavior Based Safety, Performance Improvement, Phil La Duke, acclimation, complacency, feeling safe versus being safe, over confidence, turnover, Worker Safety

Can OSHA Survive the Fiscal Cliff?

By Phil La Duke

Two debates rage these days, one regarding the most appropriate response to the so-called fiscal cliff, and the other concerning the effectiveness and the continued need for worker safety regulations.  The convergence of these two debates makes the future of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) both as a law and as an enforcement agency.

For some, the real question is not “will OSHA survive?” but “should it?” The lessons of the rapacious deregulation—the housing crisis, the orgy of banking abuses, and the rape of the poor resultant from usurious payday loan businesses—go largely unlearned or ignored, by those who argue that OSHA is an anachronism.  In effective and bloated, they assert, it’s time for OSHA to go.

For others, OSHA is a sacred cow; to even suggest that OSHA needs to be reorganized is blasphemy. In their minds to dismantle OSHA is tantamount to abandoning safety to the unscrupulous businesses that use workers like chattel.  Without OSHA, they argue, a hundred years of safety will be unceremoniously unraveled.

Both the debate over the fiscal cliff and over the need for, and relevance of, safety regulations, belie deeper conflicts; both are expressions over values.  In the case of the fiscal cliff debates people are arguing if things we as a society are worth the money we currently spending on them, in other words, are we getting our money’s worth for the things we collectively purchase. For many, this debate is about a very basic principle: the role of government.  Some see the fiscal crisis as a golden opportunity to significantly reduce big government, while others see it as an essential battle to defend decades of social advancement. Add to this debate, international controversy surrounding whether or not safety requirements have become excessive and overly burdensome. At the heart of this debate is whether or not we believe that business, left to its own designs, will do the right thing in terms of protecting workers.

I won’t take a side in these debates, but I will say that OSHA is likely to be the big loser.  To some degree OSHA has been the victim of its own success. We just don’t see disasters on the scale of the Triangle Shirt Waist fire anymore.  The success of safety regulation and enforcement has created a global public opinion (far from the consensus, but with enough sympathizers to make it significant) that the workplace is safe enough, and even if isn’t there is scarce little that government can do about it.

OSHA currently lacks the resources to do much more than to respond to complaints.  It offers a myriad of valuable free services that most businesses refuse to use. I have actively promoted OSHA’s free products and services among my customers to whom I consult only to be told that I was crazy if I thought they were going to invite OSHA into their facilities. Each one ended up paying me to do what they could have received free from OSHA. If OSHA is to survive, it needs to proactively cut funding for VPP, training, and its other highly valuable and disappointingly under-used programs and reallocate a portion of the monies saved to investigation and enforcement. Doing so will not only create public good-will as it sees OSHA as actively participating in cost reduction; it will also raise public awareness of the programs.  Increased funding for enforcement will likely bring to light the true state of safety in business today.  Perhaps there will be public outcry at widespread abuses by business or perhaps it will confirm what many believe: that business in America today value safety and do a good job protecting workers. In either event, the public good is served.

For the many of the great unwashed (and uninformed) have been swayed by campaign ads that safety costs jobs. Politicians play free and lose with insinuations that workers had better toughen up and decide whether they want to safe at work or to be unemployed. And if safety costs jobs, it follows that OSHA is a government agency dedicated to eliminating jobs, forcing high-paying low-skill jobs off shores where foreigners do the jobs for pennies on the dollar. If you believe that OSHA does this then you believe that the government is essentially spending your tax dollars to screw you out of your livelihood. Forget whether or not OSHA can survive in this environment and worry can America survive in this environment.

Safety professionals haven’t helped OSHA’s cause.  The propagation of the belief that 90% (or more) of safety is behavioral has created (in addition to a cottage industry of snake-oil salesmen) a belief that OSHA is useless—after all, why have a government agency devoted to ensuring safety by dealing with only 10% or less with the things that actually cause injuries[1] when you can just kick the stupid, lazy, and careless workers in the ass? If one believes that the secret to a safer workplace lies in behavior modification, recognition and reward, and other carrot-and-stick policies that what relevancy does OSHA have? Would we expect OSHA inspectors to audit for motivation? Would it establish standards for recognition and reward?

For many people, OSHA is a vestige of days gone by. They no longer feel the pain of losing loved ones in the workplace and have convinced themselves that it can never happen again. If OSHA hopes to survive (in any meaningful and useful sense, let’s face it there isn’t a politician alive with the gut and gumption to truly end OSHA, but there is a fair chance that it will become so emasculated and underfunded that it will cease to be more than hollow symbol. If OSHA is going to survive and thrive it will have to reinvent itself even if it is only in the public.

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[1] For the record I reject the premise that 90% or more of injuries are caused by unsafe behaviors and I understand that OSHA addresses far more than physical hazards and addresses (or seeks to address) behavioral choices through training and awareness.

Filed under: Behavior Based Safety, Phil La Duke, BBS, Behavior Based Safety, Fiscal Cliff, OSHA, Worker Safety

Understanding the Causes of Injuries

By Phil La Duke

Perhaps the most over-looked step in making the workplace safer is an understanding of the nature of injuries.  It sounds simple—after all, isn’t this all just common sense? The nature of injuries may seem pretty obvious, but when you consider the many factors that can lead to injuries, things can get pretty confusing, pretty fast..

The nature of injuries has been the source of conjecture, competing systems, and bitter feuds since the industrial revolution.  For many years worker injuries were seen as an unavoidable cost of doing business.  Farmers got kicked by mules, miners were killed in cave-ins, sailors drowned, and metal workers burned to death; that’s just the way it was and nobody gave it much thought.

As business grew more organized and experts looked for ways to make operations run more smoothly attitudes toward workplace safety changed, albeit slowly. But it wasn’t until the Triangle Shirt Waste Company fire, and to a lesser extent the publication of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, that any substantive call for government regulation of safety.

On December 29, 1970 the U.S. Government formed the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) and in the ensuing years most people viewed safety as something someone does many, if not most, took the view that if people would be more careful they wouldn’t get hurt as much. It made sense then, and it makes sense now.  This belief set was further bolstered when the National Safety Council released its finding that something like 95% of all injuries were caused by unsafe behaviors.  It all feels pretty reasonable, it all makes so much sense, and yet it’s wrong.

Before the dullards blast my in-box, yes, I will grant you that BBS is a science, if you will grant me that so are eugenics, phrenology, cryptozology, parapsychology and a host of other fad and fringe fields are also sciences in that they use the scientific method and controls and all the other criteria for one to claim such a designation.  Sufficed to say, we have struggled under the misconception that we understand the nature of injuries when in fact, we do not.

That’s not to say that some injuries aren’t caused by reckless jackasses who act with wanton disrespect for the safety of themselves or others, but those incidents are, in my opinion rare.

Human Error

People screw up. They don’t choose to, they don’t want to, but they do. We live in an imperfect world and despite our best intentions some things go awry. We can’t truly prevent human error but we can work to protect people from the consequences of their mistakes.

Process Incapability

Often variability in our processes—both mechanical and human behaviors—can create hazards that hurt people. By having tighter controls on our processes we can often prevent these issues from becoming injuries, but as with human error we must also look to manage the risk of injury through the hierarchy of controls.

Risk Taking

A big contributor to worker injuries is risk taking.  We WANT people to take some risks (for example, a worker who violates a process in order to prevent an explosion) we just don’t want them taking unjustifiable risks or taking risks without understanding the jeopardy in which they are placed by taking these risks.  People will always take shortcuts, and unless we can train them in risk assessment and help them to make better judgments we can never hope to offer any protection against disaster.
Equipment Failure

Tools wear out and break sending shrapnel into the work place, grinding wheels crumble into pieces and fling stone at the heads of workers, and saw blades fail and go flying who knows where.  These scenes play out in the workplace daily and scarce little thought is given to these events.  A good Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) program can lower the risk both by making the failures easier to predict and allowing maintenance to change tooling before it fails.

Exposure

For some, exposure issues are more environmental hygiene issues than safety issues, but in my book, if it can hurt workers then it’s a safety issues. Exposure is sometimes difficult to control because too often we only become aware of the issue when it too late to avoid the damage done through exposure.

Ergonomic Stress

As with exposure issues, ergonomic issues can be hard to spot.  Ergonomic injuries develop over time and injury occurs only after a threshold has been crossed.  These injuries tend to be serious and costly to treat.  Ergonomic injuries can be avoided by implementing a robust ergonomics program.

Poor Housekeeping

Perhaps the most common cause of injuries, near misses, and first aid cases is also the easiest to correct: poor housekeeping.  Poor housekeeping contributes to human error, makes risk taking essential, and can create everything from trip hazards to exposure risk.  A solid 5S initiative can prevent many housekeeping issues.

Nonstandard Work/Working Out of Station

Whenever we work outside the intended standard—whether it be because of part shortages, increased or decreased production, or simply workers working out of the designated work area.  This creates a situation that the people who designed the process never intended and perhaps never anticipated when they laid out the work area and associated protections.  This type of hazard must be tightly managed not only to protect the workers, but also to ensure quality and efficiency.

This list is neither exhaustive nor equally applicable to all workplaces; safety professionals need to take a hard look at the environments for which they are responsible—no external consultant or safety system provider is likely to know the hazards of your workplace as well as you do.

As long as safety management systems focus too heavily on one cause of safety while downplaying the others as less important, we will never make a sustainable improvement in worker safety.

 

Filed under: Behavior Based Safety, Loss Prevention, Safety, Equipment Failure, Ergonomic Stress, Exposure, human error, Nonstandard Work/Working Out of Station, Poor Housekeeping, Process Incapability, risk taking, Worker Safety

What Are The Alternatives to Behavior Based Safety

By Phil La Duke

 

Last week I posted yet another criticism of Behavior Based Safety (BBS) and it drew the following comment

“Good morning Phil I hope all is well. The argument for and against Behavior-Based Safety is as old as the first implemented methodologies, yet it still persists in many different beneficial and strange forms. Some refer to incentive schemes as BBS, others just a psychology-based approach as BBS and others watch a video, read an article and attempt to make it work with widely ranging results on culture and performance. I believe BBS to be a situationally-appropriate tool for a small aspect of safety. Moreover, it should be a tool focused on better understanding performance and the influences on it, than an awareness or accountability mechanism. The latter tends to cause some of the problems you write about and I have seen as well. Rather than perpetuating the continuous critique, I would sincerely be interested in reviewing the specifics of the methodology/approach/tool you propose that will accomplish the same results in the small aspect of safety BBS benefits. Would you please share?”

This isn’t the first time I’ve been asked to share the alternatives to BBS. But this is no easy feat—first of all, as this comment suggests, there is far from a single source of truth that defines BBS and its elements. Before we can discuss the relative effectiveness of BBS we need to agree as to exactly what constitutes “effectiveness” of a safety management system.  The criteria I will use are:

• Cost
• Effort
• Sustainability
• Value

Most of the purveyors of BBS agree that the following are elements of a comprehensive Behavioral Safety management system:

• Evaluation of Worker Behavior Using Checklists.

Trying to find a competitive system involves some modification of the behavioral observation.  Personally, I reject the idea that people get hurt because they knowingly and consciously behave in ways that put them in jeopardy.  I am supported in this belief by Joseph T. Hallinan, author of the book Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things In Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Well Above Average; David Marx author of Whack A Mole—The Price We Pay For Expecting Perfection; and Zachary Shore the author of Blunder: Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions. Putting this philosophic difference aside, conducting periodic reviews of the work area that focuses on all the hazards instead of focusing on purely (or even chiefly on) behaviors is far more likely to lower the risk of process failures which not only endanger workers but also puts quality, through-put, and production at risk. What alternative is there to BBS? Several tools come to mind:

1. Layered Process Audits. Layered Process Audits are checks conducted by various levels of management.  The primary purpose is to ensure that the process as performed conforms to the process requirements. Part of the Layered Process Audit system is the verification that all mistake proofing protections are in place and operational.  This is essentially an improved version of the behavioral observations that requires less effort, is far less costly, is relatively easy to sustain, and ultimately returns far more value than the behavioral observation.
2. Kaizen Events. Kaizen events are ad hoc activities designed to improve the efficiency of the work area. Kaizen events involve the workers in the area who participate in improvements by identifying and eliminating sources of waste—including those things that are likely to cause injuries.
3. 3.    5S Audits. 5S is a powerful tool designed to reduce process variation and make the work area more efficient and safer. It involves simple workplace reorganization that sorts, sets in order, scours, standardizes, and sustains improvements in the workplace.

Data Collection From Observations. Behavior Based Safety systems rely on measurements taken by watching workers perform their jobs.  While safety information should be routinely analyzed and trends should be studied to determine proactive initiatives, here again BBS falls short.  First, in an attempt to overcome Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (which states the observation itself alters the factors being observed) BBS depends on many observations.  To achieve the desired number of observations BBS system relies on numerous  trained observers who observe their peers and provide them feedback on their behaviors.  Such activities rarely normalize the data to adjust for the Hawthorn Effect (the tendency for workers to improve simply because the organization is taking action).  Data collection relative to safety indicators are key to constructing a coherent safety strategy, but again, there are better (as it relates to Cost, Effort, Sustainability and Value). Let’s take each of these factors one at a time.  The cost of conducting observations are substantial—checklists must be constructed, workers must be trained both in evaluating and being evaluated, and the observers must be paid a wage to conduct the assessment—the effort (for the same reasons) is onerous; and the long-term sustainability of these activities is dubious.  Add to this the resentment and morale issues (up to and including Union drives or labor unrest) associated with peer-to-peer audits and you have a really bureaucratic system that creates head count and saps productivity. A far better solution is the balanced score card.   According to
http://www.balancedscorecard.org/BSCResources/AbouttheBalancedScorecard/tabid/55/Default.aspx
the balanced scorecard is “a strategic planning and management system … It was originated by Drs. Robert Kaplan (Harvard Business School) and David Norton as a performance measurement framework that gave managers and executives a more ‘balanced’ view of organizational performance.”  General Electric, hailed by many as a pioneer of modern management, was an early adopter of the balanced scorecard approach

Modern balanced scorecards has evolved beyond being a simple performance measurement system and has blossomed into to a strategic tool for planning and managing a business; it provides a visual representation of the progress against strategic initiatives.  Typically the balanced scorecard provides a framework for achieving goals in Safety, Quality, Delivery, Morale, and Environment (SQDCM). In addition to the obvious advantage of leveraging existing efforts and collaborating across multiple functions, the balanced scorecard imbeds safety into standard operating procedures—instead of acting as if safety was a discrete element it is rightfully treated as a pillar on which an effective organization is built.

• Worker participation. An oft-cited reason for the “success” of BBS that it fully engages the workforce in safety management. Proponents of BBS extoll the virtues of this grass roots approach as opposed to a management driven top-down approach.  Many systems include incentives for making the workplace safer—safety BINGOs, bonuses for injury-free quarters, or similar initiatives.  A more economical, holistic approach is to use existing employee suggestion programs to solicit and reward ideas that genuinely improve the safety of the workplace.  It may not be sexy, but why create a parallel process that is limited solely to worker safety when a larger, more inclusive system already exists?
• Focus On Specific Unsafe Behaviors.  BBS proponents tout the relatively scarce types of behaviors that cause the majority of injuries.  Here I believe that this is not in fact, BBS.  This is an attempt to use process based safety tools to address a shortcoming of BBS.  But let’s take a quick look at the practice of using Pareto chart analyses to target the behaviors of greatest risk. Pareto charts track quantitative (counted) data and not qualitative (measured) data.  This kind of data is generally (but not necessarily) derived from Area Maps or Body Maps.  Since the severity of the event is not collected in Pareto analysis (the data is assumed to be more or less the same severity and holds more or less the same risk of injury) it is inappropriate to use this data in determining the critical few behaviors that represent the greatest danger.  Furthermore, this type of analysis essentially ignores hazards that are largely environmental, organizational, or mechanical.  Instead of this approach organizations should focus on ALL hazards instead of focusing on behaviors.
• Focused Feedback Performance.  In BBS feedback usually takes one of three forms: feedback at the time of observation; graphs of trends used in weekly discussion with work crews, and monthly discussions about safety by management.   While feedback on behavior is valuable it only can provide benefit in cases where the behavior was deliberate.  A large percentage of unsafe behavior is simple human error and no amount of feedback will change the fact that people make mistakes.  Another substantial source of unsafe behavior is behavioral drift (the tendency to slowly move away from the standard procedure until one unknowingly moves into risky behavior).  According to David Marx (in his book Whack A Mole: The Price We Pay For Expecting Perfection) contends that drift is an unavoidable part of human behavior.  Here again, telling someone that they drifted isn’t all that useful in changing worker behavior.  Finally, there is reckless behavior (defined as the willing choice to behave in a way so risky that no reasonable person could ever defend the behavior as in proportion to the perceived reward.) In cases of recklessness feedback on the behavior is unlikely to result in behavioral improvement.  Instead of focused feedback on behavior organizations would be far better served by implementing a Just Culture approach to safety combined with training in decision-making and a comprehensive program of error proofing.
• Data-driven decision-making. How is this a differentiator of BBS? Aren’t all safety management system based, at least to some degree, based on data-driven decision making? Clearly making the decisions on data that is primarily based on behavioral data at the expense of other relative factors is not something to brag about.
• Requires visible on-going support from managers and front-line supervision. Here again, this is not something limited to BBS. (And a contradiction with BBS’s claim that its success is rooted in the commitment of the workers and a grass-roots movement.) If managers and front-line supervision aren’t supportive of safety it will most certainly fail irrespective if it is a BBS, process based, continuous improvement, or Just Culture approach.. But in all cases I think this is a cop-out.  A good safety system should begin by engaging leadership before it starts laying out commandments.  When I custom-design a safety system I begin by assessing the leadership’s commitment to making the changes necessary to effect lasting change.  If I am not satisfied that this commitment exists I walk away. In my one-year engagements I have completely transformed cultures and produced for my customers sustainable and effective safety systems that they own without creating a parasitic relationship between vendor and customer.

This is just the tip of the iceberg—I didn’t even touch the many companies who make money by certifying people to perpetuate their crappy safety systems, sell “training materials” or dozens of trademarked consumable add-ons that end up unnecessarily costing the customer tens of thousands of dollars annually.

Did you like this post? Did you find it helpful? Was it thought provoking? Why not share it with your peers? I think they would appreciate it and I certainly would.

Filed under: Behavior Based Safety, Loss Prevention, Safety