A @#$# Storm In Texas

by Phil La Duke

“Who takes all the glory and none of the shame”—Elvis Costello

 

As safety professionals all over the civilized world continued to congratulate themselves on the swell job they’re all doing, someone had to piss on the picnic and blow up a fertilizer plant.  Thankfully, it didn’t get much news coverage what with the Boston Marathon, and who can blame the media? There won’t be a cherubic face on the Texas blast, and the glamorous backdrop of the Boston Marathon, and if there are stories of selflessness and heroism, we won’t hear them.  As for far as most people are concerned it’s just a bunch of dead, working class Texans, and what are 40 dead Texans more or less?

The bombings at the Boston Marathon had a lot to get us excited about, at an estimated 500,000 people involved in the event, it’s New England’s most watched sporting event, and it’s undeniably a big deal.  And this event had all the pageantry of an Ian Fleming novel before a parade of increasingly bad Bond film turned his work into cerebral pabulum. A big sports event is attached by rogue former USSR denizens, a small boy dies, a massive man hunt, gun fights, throw in a contrived love story, and Matt Damon and you have it all.  As I type this, I imagine there are numerous celebrities championing the victims of the Boston Marathon, collections will be taken, kudos heaped on the brave. Memes posted on Facebook from political whack jobs from both extremes blaming Obama for not doing enough or extolling him for doing so much better than Romney would have done. ”Repost this if…” as if anyone gave two tenths of a crap what anyone reposted on Facebook. I’m not denigrating the gravity of the situation, or of the heroics of those who ran to help when good sense should have sent them scurrying.  I know that at least a score of you mouth breathers are already so outraged that you struggle to read through furrowed brows and the labored breathing of the deeply offended.

Save it, yet again I am unimpressed and unswayed.  It’s been more than a week since the explosion in Texas and they still don’t seem to know exactly the death toll (up to 15 dead? When did news (I refuse to call the excrement that the modern hackneyed purveyors of “newsertainment” produce “journalism”) get so sloppy? We expect and accept fatalities in the workplace.  Sure the West, Texas explosion shook and alarmed business owners a bit, but things have already settled down, like mud sinking to the bottom of a sullied stream, clearing the waters of collective consciousness. Since the Texas explosion there have been industrial explosions at on  barge at a dock in Mobile, Alabama and at an Oil Refinery in Detroit, MI.

We’ve learned to expect and accept workplace fatalities as a cost of doing business. It sickens me that we chip away at worker safety in the name of case management—exactly what percentage of disability claims are in entirety fraudulent? And yet we treat all as if the are liars and cheats.  Politicians boldly decry the over protection of workers? When was the last time a politician died doing his or her job save for the assassin’s bullet, a bad liver, or the hyper excitement of a woman’s ministrations?

We sit and congratulate ourselves because injuries fall—we take all of the credit, we cheer and high-five, we proudly proclaim ourselves the saviors of the workingman. Yet when things go wrong we deflect any blame or accountability—“If the idiots would only follow the rules” “operations leadership doesn’t support me”.

We can’t have it both ways; these are two diametrically opposed standpoints. Either we save lives and butcher workers, or there is no relationship between what we do and whether or not people go home safe.  To paraphrase Yoda, (I won’t mimic the goofy Muppet syntax that Frank Oz compulsively adds to all characters making them sound like Fozzy Bear after he suffered a stroke) either you do it or you don’t, there’s no “try”. As my sainted, departed father used to tell me (after I defended a half-assed attempt with “I did my best”) “I can get a damned baboon in here to try hard, you get no points for being stupid.” That may seem harsh, but losing a loved one in an industrial explosion is also harsh.

Should we be more concerned about terrorism than we are about industrial explosions, the release of lethal gas into our communities, or wildfires that erupt from lumber yards? Well, certainly it’s not a contest, but WAKE UP people, the thing that will kill you is far less likely to be a mad bomber at a crowded public event than it is to be the chemical plant, grain elevator, refinery, or barge that explodes in your neighborhood. These are workplace accidents that aren’t just killing workers, they are killing first responders, and our neighbors, and people blissfully unaware of the dangers until it’s too late.

This isn’t an indictment of any particular industry.  While it’s true that the closer an industry is to harvesting raw materials the dirtier and more dangerous it tends to be

So safety professionals either step up or shut up. If you aren’t going to take responsible for these catastrophic breakdowns than shut your gaping pie hole about saving my life. If you did your best and this still happened than do us ALL a favor and get the hell out of the business. And for those of you, who are sitting there thinking that it can’t happen to you, know that those who suffered these disasters likely felt the same way.

Filed under: Phil La Duke, Safety, Worker Safety, Boston Marathon, community danger, explosion, fatalities, Fertilizer plant explosion, marathon oil explosion, Mobile Alabama explosion, Safety, Shit storm, workplace explosions

Wake Up: The Life you Save May Be Mine

By Phil La Duke

I am slowly migrating my posts from my other blog (the decommissioned Rockford Greene International blog that has since been renamed Worker Safety Net) to this blog.  But in the interest of not boring the socks off those of you who used to read both blogs, in each case, I rewrite and give a hard edit to these pieces. In short, while this may not be a entirerly new post I believe it is different enough to be worth the read.)

Tens of millions are spent reminding workers to work safely and be mindful of the many hazards they will inevitably face in the course of their workdays, but scare little focus has been cast on one of the biggest contributors to workplace injuries: the lack of sleep. The tentative recovery has employers gun-shy about hiring and as things pick up workers are increasingly fatigued as they try to do more and more with less and less.

Many of us worry about not getting enough sleep, but how harmful is the lack of sleep? Very. Consider the following:

• Almost A Third Of Us Don’t Get Enough Sleep. According to Fox News, 30% of all American workers don’t get enough sleep (not on the job, of course). The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last year that 50 million to 70 million American adults suffer from sleep and wakefulness disorders.
• Lack of Sleep Makes Us Sick. According to USNews.comlack of sleep has been tied to mental distress, depression, anxiety, obesity, hypertension, diabetes, high cholesterol and certain risk behaviors including cigarette smoking, physical inactivity and heavy drinking.
• Drowsy Driving Is a Major Issue. The most common workplace fatality is a traffic accident on the job. Drowsydriver.org reports that 60% of adult drivers—about 168 million people —say they have driven while drowsy 37% (or 103 million people), have actually fallen asleep at the wheel. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), more than 750 people die and 20,000 more are injured each year due directly to fatigued commercial vehicle drivers, and an estimated 20% of vehicle crashes are linked to drowsy driving.
• The problem is bigger than just highway safety, according to Joseph Hallinan, in Why We Make Mistakes: How We Work Without Seeing, Forget Things In Seconds, And Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average nearly a dozen pilots fell asleep in mid-flight between 2003 and 2007, and when medical students reported working five or more marathon shifts in a single month caused the chance of making a mistake that harmed a patient went up 700%.
• The Economy Isn’t Helping. Apart from the financial problems that keep you up at night, the floundering economy has made the workplace more dangerous in other ways, for example, studies have shown that workers with more than one job were significantly more sleep deprived, so those workers forced to moonlight to make ends meet are more likely to be sleep deprived.
• Sleep Deprivation Contributes to Poor Decision Making. According to Hallinan, even moderate sleep deprivation can cause brain impairment equivalent to driving while drunk AND has been shown to significantly increase an individual’s willingness to take risks.

  In effect, sleep deprived workers make more mistakes, poorer decisions, and take more risks…all things that have been repeatedly shown to increase the probability of worker injuries.

What Can Be Done About it?

The last thing that anyone needs or wants, is another thing for the safety guy to carp about, but all is not lost; experts at the National Sleep Foundation and elsewhere offers tips for getting a good night’s sleep:

1. Don’t sleep in on weekends; maintain your weekday sleep schedules.
2. Wind down. Experts recommend that people establish a regular relaxing routine to transition between waking and sleep. Soaking in a hot tub and then reading a book before retiring can greatly improve the quality of sleep one gets. Make your bedroom sleep friendly—dark, quiet, comfortable and cool.
3. Use your bed for sleeping. Experts warn that watching television or working on a computer (and butchering chickens I would suppose) can impede your ability to truly relax when it comes time for sleeping
4. Avoid caffeine nicotine and alcohol for several hours before bedtime. It makes sense that not ingesting chemicals that increase your metabolism and make you jittery right before retiring won’t help you get restorative sleep.
5. Allow enough to time for sleep. Before you raise your hands in protest that you would if you could, consider that people who get enough sleep are significantly more productive than those who are deprived.
6. Nap. A twenty-minute (no more) nap followed by exercise will make you feel refreshed and provide you a pick-me-up that will make you more productive.
7. Finish eating at least 2-3 hours before your regular bedtime. The act of digesting food takes a lot of energy and things that require your body to work hard make it more difficult to go to sleep.
8. Exercise regularly and complete your workout a few hours before bedtime. The goal of exercise (at least cardio exercises) is to raise your heart rate, increase your metabolism, and generally do the opposite of what you should do right before bedtime. But regular exercise several hours before bedtime will actually help relieve stress and relax you sufficiently so that you can get a good night’s sleep.
9. Recognize that one of the most common reasons for insomnia is worrying about not getting enough sleep. Lying quietly with ones eyes closed can be very restorative, and while it is not as healthy as deep REM sleep, it can be a short-term solution to the sleep deprivation problem.

Safety professionals should raise the awareness of this problem among workers and share tips for getting enough sleep, especially on the night shift or for workers assigned to swing shift.  While there has been no conclusive link between a lack of sleep and mortality, studies have shown that employees who work swing shifts tend to have shorter life-spans.

There comes a point where telling people what they need to do to be safe outside the workplace is intrusive and inappropriate; expecting workers to get enough sleep isn’t one of them. When the worker has a lifestyle issue—whether that be substance abuse or insomnia—that emperils him/herself or others in the workplace it is within the company’s right to act.

Filed under: Phil La Duke, Risk, Safety, Worker Safety, getting a good night's sleep, managing personal risk, performance shaping factors, sleep deprivation, Worker Safety, worker safety and sleep deprivation

Process Improvements May Be Hazardous to Your Healthj

By Phil La Duke

There are a lot of useful things that safety professionals can learn from manufacturing, particularly Lean Manufacturing, yet surprisingly few safety practitioners—even within manufacturing—see the connection.  Two of these concepts that have a profound value on safety and risk are cycle time and takt time.  Takt time is generally defined as the maximum time per unit that it takes to produce something to fulfill the customer’s demands, and cycle time is the time it takes to do one job. Both terms are measures of capacity and key elements of efficiency.

That might not seem to mean much in terms of safety and risk, but it does.

Shorter takt times mean that providing goods (or services) to the customer is happening faster. This fact in itself doesn’t mean very much, but if you consider that to improve efficiency (for our purposes, efficiency will mean producing goods or services as quickly as possible without compromising cost, quality, or safety) you have to reduce your takt time, we start to see implications for safety.  Few of you would argue that “haste makes waste” and in fact, rushing to complete a job introduces the risk of injury, and that is exactly what can happen if we try to reduce takt time simply by cracking the whip and force the workers to work faster.

Similarly, cycle time is the time it takes to do one job. In manufacturing, it is the time it takes  to complete all the tasks at one station and this is typically described in minutes or seconds.  Years ago when I built seats for one of the Big Three auto manufacturers my cycle time was 55 seconds, and our takt time was around 16 hours (the time it took for one car  to go from hunks of metal, plastic, and cloth to a fully functioning automobile.) To improve the takt time you generally have to reduce cycle time.  The key to both these activities is to eliminate waste.  In the discipline of Kaizen there are seven kinds of waste, or muda as they like to call it, mainly so that there job feels like a cool karate class, but then I digress. The seven wastes are:

1. Defects (and rightfully this should include injuries and damage to facilities or equipment, or environmental spills, from a process stand point, when a process fails, whatever the unintended consequence is waste)
2. Overproduction (work done without an immediate order for it)
3. Inventories waiting to be  \processed
4. Unnecessary movement of stock (like moving things around your operation)
5. Unnecessary motion of employees (people having to walk farther than necessary, for example)
6. Overly processing (quality checks or redoing job because it wasn’t done correctly in the first place)
7. Waiting (workers standing idle because they have nothing to do)

All of these sources of waste introduce variation into the process and where there is variation there is risk of injury.  So we want to eliminate waste and be sure that we preserve the safety of the workplace; sounds simple right? Well, predictably, it isn’t.

Apart from the obvious risks of rushing, let’s assume that there is an unidentified hazard in a job (for our purposes, it doesn’t matter if the job is taking orders at a logistics company, running a ride at a theme park, or building jet engines) if the cycle time is decreased it means that the job is done more times a day (assuming a steady flow of consumer demand) which means that the probability that the worker will be injured through interaction with the hazards grows proportionately. Think of like this let’s say you are a shoplifter (relax I know some of you aren’t really shop lifters) and you decide to steal a steak from your grocer. Two things come into play (actually more than two, but bear with me) the length of time to steal one steak (takt time) and the number of times you go back to the store to steal a steak (like any good shoplifter you go back to the same store over and over again because you know the layout and routines of the staff). Unlike the odds of say, flipping a coin that remain 50:50 each and every time you flip it, our scenario is a bit different.  While the coin will never change in a way that will affect the probability our chances of successfully shoplifting are in almost constant flux (security measures are likely to get “beefed up”, the store staff is more and more likely to recognize you and suspect that you may be the thief (assuming you weren’t seen in the act).  To reduce your risk you might decide to steal something else, something that reduces your takt time because it is closer to the exit, or you might decide to lower you cycle time to let things “cool down” before trying it again.

How is this important to safety? Well ergonomic strain can build to create the most costly injuries, and you don’t have to be swinging a sledgehammer to get one. A worker may be able to process invoices safely at three an hour, and might be able to ultimately increase his or her time to say, six an hour, without noticing any immediate discomfort.  But after doing six invoices an hour, 5 days a week, 8 hours a day for a month, he or she may begin to show symptoms of a repetitive strain injury.

There are other exposure risks as well.  Let’s say a doctor sees 4 patients an hour.  Each time a sick person comes in for treatment (assuming it is a contagious disease and not a chronic complaint or injury) the doctor risks getting ill.  If the doctor increases the number of patients (and in turn decreases his or her takt time) he or she increases the likelihood of contracting an illness. You can carry this example to working with asbestos or a radioactive activity. The more times you are exposed to a hazard the more likely it is that you will be harmed by it.

What this means in practical terms is that when we calculate probability we need to remember that: a) we are calculating not the chances that someone will interact with a hazard, but also the likelihood that that interaction will cause harm and b) both the number of times a worker interacts with a hazard and the duration of the hazard are important things to think about when considering probability.

The safety professional must be involved in these efforts to improve workplace efficiency not just to add value, although that is important, but also to ensure that the improvement effort doesn’t just trade one set of wastes for another, in this case, injuries.

Filed under: Performance Improvement, Phil La Duke, process improvement, Safety, Worker Safety, cycle time, exposure risks, exposure to hazards, muds, process improvements, takt time, waste, Worker Safety

Are You Turning A Blind Eye To Hazards?

By Phil La Duke

 “He’s as blind as he can be, just sees what he wants to see”—John Lennon, Nowhere Man

Hazards come in many shapes and sizes—from the physical to the behavioral and all points in between.  And the efficacy with which hazards are identified to a large extent shape the overall effectiveness of your safety management system. So what happens when your personal or organizational biases prevent you from seeing things accurately and honestly?

In broad strokes you tend to find the things for which you are looking and scarce little else.  If your organization, for example, gathers most of it’s information about hazards by watching workers perform their jobs they are likely to find a host of unsafe behaviors at the expense of other hazards that are equally (or potentially more) dangerous.  Think you are immune to letting your prejudices getting in the way of your observations and decision-making? Experts would disagree.

“When You Sell Hammers, All The World Is A Nail”—Source unknown

Bias 1: Most Injuries Are Caused by Unsafe Behavior.

Entire methodologies have grown up around the belief that you can reduce injuries by reducing unsafe behaviors.  Irrespective of your personal opinions around BBS, when you believe that worker behavior is the overwhelmingly most frequent causative factor what sense is there in looking at things like poorly maintained machinery, facility issues, or ineffectual training.

Furthermore, many injuries are that ARE the result of unsafe behaviors are in fact, basic human error and may not be proceeded by overtly observable unsafe acts. So the bias toward behavior, even when behavior is INDEED a risk factor, may blind you to other threats.

Bias 2: Severity Bias.   Author David Marx, identifies several biases that he believes can directly undermine worker safety (and public safety). Marx, in his book, Whack a Mole: The Price We Pay for Expecting Perfection Marx introduces the concept of severity bias.  According to Marx, severity bias is the practice of enforcing greater consequences for those events that produce a more severe outcome.  Marx argues that the outcome of at risk behavior is immaterial—that the true risk lies in the flawed decision making and recklessness. In other words, it doesn’t matter whether or not an employee’s actions have never killed or injured someone, the fact that the behavior’s rewards are so out of proportion with the potential for harm is enough to judge it inappropriate.  If we buy into this bias, we tend to excuse inappropriate risk taking—and even recklessness—provided that the behaviors don’t result in an incident.

Bias 3: Professional Bias.  Marx also identifies a tendency to treat behaviors more harshly as one gets closer to the front line of operations.  Research has shown that people tend to let higher ranking professionals off the hook not out of fear of retaliation, but simply because the higher the rank of a professional the more likely that people will assume that the executive knows what he or she is doing and is therefore less deserving of coaching or discipline.  When you exhibit professional bias you create a multi-tiered system of accountability. Simply stated, you have a double (or triple) standard.

Bias 4: Some Hazards Are Just Common Sense.  Another great thinker on the topic of bias as it pertains to safety is Dr. Robert Long.  Long explores the relationship between risk and human judgment in his book, Risk Makes Sense. Long contends that there is no such thing as common sense. According to Long intelligent people make sense of the situation based on there personal experiences, things they have been taught by their parents, teachers, and peers.  To expect that a worker will intuitively assess the risk of a hazard the way others in the population would is unreasonable.  But often we take it for granted that people will understand the intrinsic dangers of a circumstance and fail to manage the hazard as being too trivial, condescending, or even insulting were we to mention it.

Bias 5: The All’s Well Expectation.  In the fantastic book, Why We Make Mistakes,: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things In Seconds, And Are All Pretty Sure We are Way Above Average Joseph  Hallinan takes a critical look at the factors that cause us to…well, screw up.  Hallinan notes that people tend to see the world through rose colored glasses (particularly when they are examining themselves).  This tendency to see things that aren’t there can cause us to miss hazards rooted in the absence of an element.  Remember the puzzles “what’s wrong with this picture?” the same phenomena is at play in our assessments of the safety of the work environment.

Assumptions

Sometimes it isn’t a bias, per se, that gets us into trouble. Sometimes we miss hazards because we make assumptions.  One of the most deadly assumptions is that something is true when it is not.  Dangerous assumptions pervade our work assessments like the assumption that one worker does the job exactly the same as another.  Another such assumption is that the work is done the same across shifts. Because we make these assumptions our hazard assessment is intrinsically flawed.

What’s The Answer?

Putting aside our biases isn’t easy—for one, just because we have a predisposition toward a certain belief doesn’t mean we are always wrong—but being mindful of our prejudices is a great place to start.  If we can find ways to look at the work place differently (for example, listing all the individual actions, like walking, carrying, etc.) we have a better chance of getting a good view of our workplace.  Another useful method of overcoming our biases is to invite someone who knows little or nothing about the process to help in assess the risk.  The fresh set of eyes is likely to yield surprisingly results. A similar, yet no less effective method of hazard analysis is to “swap” an area with another inspector. Like the person with no experience with the process, the other inspector is likely to find hazards that you have walked by a dozen times without noticing.

Filed under: Phil La Duke, Safety, Worker Safety, assumptions about safety, bias, hazard investigation, Just culture, Professional bias, safety blindspots, Severity bias, Worker Safety

Let’s Forget the Perfect World

 

As I write this someone, somewhere is designing a system based on the erroneous assumption that things will run perfectly.  So many things—from products to complex processes ignore the simple fact that no system is perfect, and because these systems ignore this fact the systems fail.  Why do we develop systems based on a perfect world when we all know that not only do people make mistakes, so do computers, products, and even robots.  Ideally, we would allow for this imperfection, and in fact, many systems do.  Unfortunately, leaving the perfect world takes time and forsight and these days both are in scare supply.

The Curse of Variability

 

Too often we create “perfect” systems that are corrupted by unforseen factors.  These serpents sneak into our processes and wreak havoc as we sit helplessly nearby wondering how we could have ever prevented such a disaster.  I call this the “Eden Effect”. Whether we call these process disruptions gremlins, ghosts in the machine, SNAFUs or viruses things nobody counted on enter our system and make us shake our heads.  Take for instance the American black bear who wandered into the parking lot of a customer of mine.  They jokingly asked me how to record this hazard in our database.  Clearly this was a safety issue—you can’t have a bear wandering around the parking lot—and yet there was nothing in the safety process (or security process for that matter) that dealt with how to remove a bear from the premises.

Not all process failures are quite as far-fetched.  In fact, many of the most destructive things in our processes aren’t statistical outlyers at all.  They are simply common place things that we didn’t forsee, and our completely understandable lack of foresight leads to disaster and even death.  We describe these things as “freak accidents” or  “acts of God” and excuse ourselves because there was no way we could have seen it coming. The reality is that we often can predict things and take no measures to prevent them; there is nothing wrong with that.  In many cases the likelihood of a failure is so incredibly remote that it doesn’t warrent any preventive measure or counter measure to reduce its severity.  Take our bear example; there had been reports of bears wandering into populated areas and certainly the safety professionals could have had some inkling that there was a possibility that a bear would come calling, and yet they did nothing.  An encounter with a bear is highly likely to cause a sever injury or even a fatality.  Should we judge the safety professional’s behavior as reckless? Was he negligent? No.  Most would agree that the very remote chances of a bear coming into the parking lot did not merit a counter measure even in though the consequences could be fatal.  Any measures to protect workers from bear attacks (likely a once in a couple of lifetime occurence) would be judged as financially irresponsible and ridiculously over protective.

How can a safety professional know the balance between improving the safety system and being over protective?

• Stop trying to do the impossible.  People make mistakes; that as much of a universal truth as you will ever get in this life.  We have to make our peace with the fact that smart, highly skilled, cautious people will make mistakes and there is nothing in this world we can do to prevent them. We CAN, however, reduce the likelihood of mistakes and the severity of the consequences to the point where mistakes don’t kill people, by managing the things that increase the likelihood of mistake making:
  • Stress. People under stress think differently than those with less stress.  Some brain research has even shown that excessive, prolonged stress can change our brain chemistry.  When we are stressed it signals our subconscious that we need to adapt and the brain starts to experiment with the safety of our environment by causing us to make mistakes.  Mistakes are our subconscious mind looking for the safest route for a quick exit, but unfortunately it tends to find out that something isn’t safe by falling victim to an accident.
  • Incompetance. People who are physically or intellectually unable to do there jobs correctly are going to make more mistakes than those who are better suited to the job requirements. 
    We do no one a service by putting them in a position where they face the real possibility of serious injury by doing the job.  Training can eliminate some incompetance but it can only take us so far.  We also need to beef up post offer screening and our over all recruiting and hiring process if we are going to drive incompentence out of the workplace.
  • Fatigue. As we get fatigued we make poor choices and mistakes.  Safety professionals should take a hard look at fatigue levels of workers in areas of the most frequent near misses and injuries and modify work schedules to reduce fatigue. 
• Recognize that Systems Also Produce Unexpected Results.  For decades business has worshipped automation, and anyone who works in automation will tell you that you can’t always predict, or count on. what an automated system will produce.  An aggressive Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) System will go a long way in improving equipment reliability, but even TPM can’t tighten your process to the point where everything produced by it is perfect.
• Build Systems that Can Tolerate Drift.  Not only will people (and machines) make mistakes, they will also slowly (even inperceptably) move from the design standard away from the norm until they ultimately have moved outside the processes tolerance for drift.  Saw blades dull, drill bits get brittle, people take short cuts, until the saw won’t make a clean cut, drill bits snap like pretzels, and people get hurt.  The key to building a system with a high tolerance for variability is to study the factors that must be true for the process to perform and compare them to the likely amount of drift.  This sounds hard, and it is more difficult than it sounds, but until we build better systems that can tolerate variability in materials, environment, machinery, and most importantly, human behavior we will still be counting stitches and bemoaning the fact that we don’t live in a perfect world.

Filed under: Phil La Duke, Safety, Safety Culture, Worker Safety, Influencing Human Error, mistake proofing, process control, variability, Worker Safety

Talking Dollars, Making Sense

 

The Great Recession likely has forever changed Operations leadership’s view of safety.  Gone are the days when safety professionals could lean on “it’s the right thing to do” to justify their actions and initiatives.  Operations leadership rightfully expects that the Safety function will contribute to the bottom line and show a return on investment for the funds it is given in its budget.

Quantifying the value provided by the safety function isn’t easy—most of what it does is cost avoidance rather than profit, and when one talks about cost avoidance, the conversation can quickly turn hypothetical. Despite these difficulties it is still possible to put together a compelling business case for safety.

Know What’s Important

Every industry has some measure that is more important than anything else, and that measure is seldom safety.  In mass production, downtime is an area in which Operations leadership is keenly interested, in other industries sales are what gets the most attention, still others it is delivery time or days in production.  While most (if not all) of these companies care about safety, safety is not seen as “keeping the lights on” and typically efforts to keep the workplace safer are seen as completely divorced from the other business measures.

The key to creating a compelling business case for safety is to express injuries in terms that Operations understands and to which it can relate.  Safety professionals must demonstrate the relationship between safety and whatever metric the organization links most closely to its success.  Years ago, I worked with a heavy truck manufacturer where a sharp safety professional was able to express the cost of injuries in terms of the additional number of trucks that the plant would have to produce to recoup the costs incurred because of injuries.

Know Your Costs

An organization’s cost of injuries should include both direct costs and indirect costs.  Direct costs are generally easy to gather and/or calculate.  These are costs like fines, medical treatment for the injured worker, and Worker’s Compensation costs.  Surprisingly, many organizations jealously guard Worker’s Compensation cost information from the safety department despite the obvious connection between the two areas. Indirect costs include things like loss of productivity, damage to products, and damage to the company’s image or brand.  Indirect costs are difficult to calculate and Operations leadership may see attempts to quantify indirect costs as juking the stats.

For example, let’s take a look at an injury where the worker cuts his hand and requires stitches.  Halfway through an eight hour shift a worker cuts his hand. The injury requires production to stop for 12 minutes, and a supervisor has to drive the injured worker to the clinic that is 10 minutes away.  It takes an hour to treat the injury after which the injured worker is sent home.

Direct Costs

• 12 minutes loss of production (average wage of idled workers x average hourly pay x .2).
• Wage of injured worker (wage x 4 hours)
• Wage of supervisor while driving the worker to the clinic, waiting during treatment, and driving back to the workplace (wage x 1.4 hours)
• Wage of janitor to clean up blood (wage x 15 minutes)
• Cost of treatment
• Wage of safety professional to complete required paper work.
• Wage of the safety professional to conduct the incident investigation
• Wage of the supervisor to participate in the incident investigation
• Wage of witnesses who participate in the incident investigation
• Wage of the Operations manager to read and react to the incident investigation
• Wages associated with OSHA inspection
• Fines

Indirect Costs

• 12 minutes loss of production (average wage of idled workers x average hourly pay x .2).
• Increase in insurance premium
• Costs associated with decreased morale
• Cost of legal consultation
• Court Costs
• Legal fees

 

It’s wise to present only the direct costs as actual costs, but it is also a good idea to reference the indirect costs as costs above and beyond those that you can quantify with hard figures.

Depending on how hospitable your Operations leadership is to safety, you may be able to skip the actual hard figures in favor of a estimated rate.  OSHA has a wonderful tool for calculating the costs of safety that includes both direct and indirect costs that the agency provides for free on its website. (http://www.osha.gov/SLTC/etools/safetyhealth/mod1_estimating_costs.html). The tool estimates the cost of a worker fatality at $910,000 (a ridiculously low number based on a National Safety Council study from 1998—but realistically this cost has probably not dropped from that time), $28,000 for a Lost Work Day injury, and $1,300 for a recordable injury. By entering one’s injury figures into the calculator one can estimate a fairly reliable cost figure.  This same website affords you the opportunity to calculate the impact of the cost of injuries on profit and sales as well.

Make It Personal

Several years ago I discovered a way to save companies millions of dollars by reducing their Workers’ Compensation costs.  After saving companies an average of $2.5 million (in one case saving a walloping $8.5 million in less than 8 months) I spent the next four years unsuccessfully trying to convince other companies to engage me for my services.  I learned later that I was not speaking the same language as my prospects.  On one hand I safety professionals who tended to be risk averse and shy about introducing me to the decision makers in Operations. On the other hand I had safety professionals who couldn’t see how what I was suggesting was different from what they where already doing or were reluctant to engage outside services.  In cases where I did have access to the Operations leadership I was equally likely to either make a sale or stiff resistance.  Nothing I said would pique their interests.  I was flabbergasted; didn’t they WANT to reduce injuries and safe millions in months?  Ultimately that particular business venture was a victim of the great recession and I parted ways with the company for whom I had invented it.  Recently I was talking about my puzzling dilemma with the COO of a manufacturing firm and he told me that the average plant manager didn’t care about Workers’ Compensation costs since that was considered a corporate cost and generally wouldn’t effect the plant manager’s bonus.  With that explanation things started to make great sense.  People respond to the things that affect them personally.  If I had positioned things just a little bit differently I probably would have been wildly successful.

If safety professionals want to be successful they have to find a way to make the decision makers successful and that is easier than most people think. The answer is simple: find out what is important to decision makers and relate safety in terms that they can understand.  Safety professionals need to be careful however, and never EVER exaggerate or misrepresent the costs.

 

Filed under: Loss Prevention, Safety, Worker Safety, calculating the cost of injuries, direct and indirect cost of injuries., safety and costs

Why We Make Bad Decisions

Posting  about 20 hours early this week (so don’t expect a fresh one at noon EST tomorrow.

By Phil La Duke

The View From the Top Of the Cliff

I’m in the middle of reading, Risk Makes Sense: Human Judgment and Risk by Dr. Robert Long and I can already recommend it.  Dr. Long’s work got me thinking about the concept of risk and bad decisions.  I’m not going to talk about the book beyond saying that it is a must read for any Human Resources, Quality, or most of all Safety professional.  Instead I thought I would share some of the insights I had as I reflected on the nature of bad decision-making.

While it’s true that there are plenty of instances where injuries are caused by equipment failure, an act of God, or other freak occurrence, my experience has shown that a fair amount of injuries, if not MOST injuries, are the result of bad decisions. Whether the decision is to knowingly take an unreasonable risk or just to do something stupid; at one point or another we all make bad decisions. If we are ever going to hope to make the workplace safer we have to help people make better decisions, and to do that, we have to understand why people make such poor choices.

The Need For Expediency Trumps the Need To Be Safe

Human beings have a natural inclination to seek out expediency; we want to avoid unnecessary work and hassle whenever we can.  If asked to choose between the expeditious and the safe, people will generally gauge the risk of consequences and weigh it against the rewards.

Let me tell you a story that I think illustrates a lot about poor decision making. I am the world’s worst surfer.  I have been surfing for nearly 20 years and am not measurably better than the first time I surfed, but it’s something I enjoy.  The first time I went surfing was at Sanofre State Park, near Camp Pendleton in Southern California.  Trail Six is a winding path to the beach that creeps along the base of sandstone cliffs that overlook the Pacific Ocean.  As we approached the path, my buddy (who was introducing the world of surfing to me) looked at me and laid out a choice for me point blank: “Which way do you want to go? There’s the fast way and there’s the safe way.” I asked what the difference was and he told me about 20 minutes.  I asked, “which way do you usually go?” and followed him as we strayed from the path and headed to the edge of what I judged to be a 30-50 foot cliff.  As we walked past the wreaths where others had fallen and died and the signs that warned of unstable cliffs (and urged us to go back) I grew a bit apprehensive but I reasoned that these veterans were smart enough to judge the risks and they would never put themselves, and me, in harm’s way.

We reached the edge of the cliff and clutching a surfboard in one hand, literally climbed down its face, from one precarious foot- and handhold to the next, one handed.  “Don’t look down” someone warned in all earnestness.  The wind was brisk, and catching my board, threatened to pull me from the cliff and hurl me to the rocks below. I got scared but it was too late.  “I am going to die” I remember thinking over and over again. Our party of six surfers got to the bottom without incident.  I’ve made that climb dozens of times since, and each time it gets a little easier. Why would anyone, let alone someone who works in worker safety, make such a bad decision?

Reason #1: Expediency

Clearly it was more expedient to climb down the cliff’s face than it would be to walk 20 minutes down the trail.  All I gained from taking the trail was safety where as I lost 20 minutes, inconvenienced my friend and risked losing the respect of my newfound surfing buddies.  I chose expediency even though there were plenty of indications that expediency would come at the cost of my personal safety.  This same thought process is at play when a skilled tradesman decides not to lock out because he is only going to be in the robot cell for a minute, or a truck driver decides not to wear her seat belt because she is only going to be driving across the compound, or a someone uses a golf cart to move furniture or anyone of a thousand examples from around industry.  If it takes appreciably more time to do something the safe way, people will generally look for shortcuts even if they risk death.

Reason #2: Peer Pressure

Some industries, or even some workplaces, have the misguided belief that safety is for wimps.  And that anyone who advocates for safety over production or expediency is a mother hen, a goofball, or a nerd.  Let’s be clear: in my example, I imposed the peer pressure on myself.  My buddy was perfectly willing to walk down the trail with me if I was in anyway uncomfortable.  But I wanted to be one of the guys.  I was learning the norms and if I was going to be a surfer I was going to do whatever surfers did, and surfers walked down the cliff.  The same can be said of the workplace.  New workers want to belong (having a new job sucks) and they want to feel comfortable so they adopt the norms that they see on the job.  If the safety guy (or trainer) tells them one thing but the rest of the crew is doing something else, the new guy will adopt the traits that make him or her fit in.

Reason #3: Imperfect Knowledge

Often we make decisions based on something we assume to be fact, or think we know but don’t.  In my case, I was trusting that others had knowledge that I didn’t, and in my case I was correct.  I trusted that my colleagues knew the situation better than I did (or the state of California did for that matter). I believed them because they were there and able to assess the situation in ways that I (or the state park) could.  I have seen far too many fatalities that were caused simply because someone believed something was true when it was not—from machines that were believed to be locked out when they were energized to parking brakes thought to be engaged when they weren’t.

Reason #4: Past Successful Outcomes

The first couple of reasons explained why I took the risk in the first place, but it doesn’t explain why I continued to take the risk.  As I got to know my peers and gained their respect I could absolutely have said, “you know guys, maybe we shouldn’t…” but after successfully negotiating the cliff numerous times I downplayed the risk in my mind.  After all, why would I stop doing something at which I was repeatedly successful?  Think about workplaces where workers do repetitive tasks day in and day out.  How likely will they be to take risks that do not result in negative consequences but that reap real rewards?

Reason #5: Bad Decisions Breed Bad Decisions

Once I had committed to climbing one-handed down the side of a cliff there was no turning back.  I was in a dangerous situation and every decision I made from that point on would prove more critical.  This happens in the workplace often and many times ends in tragedy.  Consider the worker who is violating the company’s no smoking policy by having an unsanctioned smoke break in the work area.  When he thought he heard someone approaching he quickly throws the lit cigarette in  a trash barrel filled with acetone soaked rags which ignites, panicked he runs for a fire extinguisher…Often one bad decision leads to a string of worse decisions simply because the first decision eliminates the possibility of good decisions from that point forward. Someone smarter than me once said mistakes + blame = criminality; I think that’s true.

Reason #6: Under Appreciation Of Risk

I can still, years later, clearly remember thinking, “people have been telling me to be careful for years…how risky can this be?”  I have been warned so often about dangers so ridiculously remote that I dismissed the risk of falling almost immediately.  In some cases, we get so many ridiculous warnings (in Michigan, there are road signs that say “Bridge May Be Icy” that are posted year long;  every July I think, “not bloody” likely) that we just tune them all out.  How many people have you heard say, “everything causes cancer” in response to the latest medical warning? In the workplace sometimes we remind people to work safe so frequently and to be mindful of dangers so remote that our voices start to sound like blah, blah, blah. Worker’s know the difference between something that could potentially in some cases maybe harm them and those that most certainly WILL harm them; we need to stop acting as if that they can’t.

Reason #7: Lack of Immediate Negative Consequences

            After I successfully made the climb (climbing up that bugger after 4 hours of surfing was miserable, but I did it) it made all my apprehension seem silly and trivial.  I was fine and had been stupid worrying about falling to my death. The same dynamic plays out in the workplace.  Workers make bad decisions and they are fine so they start to disbelieve the laws of probability.

At the end of the day there is little we can do to control how people will make decisions, but we can work to obviate the negative effects of these seven reasons. But even if we can’t help people make bad decisions let’s all remember that even though everybody at sometime will make a bad decision, nobody should ever have to die because of it.  Ultimately, I—the worker—control my own safety, but I sure hope there is someone out there trying to shield me from the logical consequences of my own foolishness.  The answer isn’t in reminding me not to die, nor is it in taking away my right to make decisions, and we can’t bubble-wrap and mistake proof the world.  In the end we have to be our brother’s keeper.  It’s up to us as people (not as safety professionals) to help protect people from bad decisions, our own and others’ as well.

Filed under: Behavior Based Safety, Phil La Duke, Worker Safety, At risk behavior, at risk behaviour, Decision making, human error, Phil La Duke, Phil LaDuke, Philip La Duke, Philip LaDuke, risk, risk management, risk taking, Why We Make Bad Decisions

Effective Hazard Management: The First Step To A Safer Work Place

By Phil La Duke

 

 

Those of you who’ve just discovered my blog might be under the impression that the only things I post are things meant to provoke cranks from the lunatic fringe into a digital tête-à-têtes Some of you might be surprised that I am capable of posting without having some over-caffeinated brute send me semi-coherent hate mail. And while I do so love to rattle the proverbial cages, I thought for my own sanity I would stay away from any sort of controversy this week and address a topic that is especially near and dear to me: hazard management.

Don’t worry all you folks who read my stuff just to get offended worked up in a froth of self-righteous indignation, if you’re looking to take offense, I’m sure you will find something to rail against. Hazard management is one of four pillars of a universally sound safety management system (the others being: Incident response, risk management, and safety strategy—there are other elements that shape the efficacy of an individual safety system, but these tend to differ from industry to industry and government to governement.

To accept hazard management as a cornerstone of safety you have to accept that without hazards there can be no injuries, so effective hazard management, that is, containing and/or correcting the hazard before someone is injured, is the first step to a safer workplace.

Anatomy of an Injury

For a worker to get injured three things must be present a:

1. Hazard
2. Interaction
3. Catalyst

Hazards

Before we continue, I should define what I mean by a hazard. A hazard is any condition that may cause an injury. Hazards, therefore, can be procedural, mechanical, environmental, and yes behavioural. Effectively a hazard is anything that can cause an injury—accidental or deliberate. Since safety is an expression of probability (We describe something as safe as if the condition of safety is an absolute, but most of us (didn’t’ say ALL for all of those looking to take a slight on behalf of a bunch of people you will never meet) understand that no environment is absolutely free of risk and therefore cannot be described as completely “safe”.) Hazards are the things that increase the risk of injuries. What About Behaviour? Before we continue, I should define what I mean by a hazard. A hazard is any condition that may cause an injury. Hazards, therefore, can be procedural, mechanical, environmental, and yes behavioural. Effectively a hazard is anything that can cause an injury—accidental or deliberate.

Interaction

Whenever I meet a new client, I invariably get a worried Operations leader who worries that I am going to “safety them out of business.” I like to tell them that the safest organizations are those who went broke and closed their doors. Nobody is getting hurt in mothballed factories or abandoned mines. Being a good safety professional means recognizing that we can make a process so “safe” that it effectively makes it too inefficient to run. In those cases we protect the workers from injuries, but we also “protect” them from paychecks. A hazard in and of itself doesn’t injure someone unless the person interacts with it. This statement may seem so basic that some of you are thinking, “no kidding genius” but this understanding is key to how we approach containment and correction of injuries.

Catalysts

A catalyst is a factor that sets things into motion, call it the straw that breaks the camels back. Without the catalyst a person can interact with a hazard and escape unharmed. The lack of a catalyst allows workers to engage in at-risk behaviour without getting hurt, which teaches the worker that an unsafe act is benign. We walk by hazards every day, we see them in our homes, and encounter them every day on our morning commute. Think of the catalyst as that little extra element that either sets the injury in motion, makes an injury worse, or makes the interaction far more likely. For example, standing in a puddle of water is not in itself likely to injure someone, but standing in water while making repairs on an energized piece of equipment makes an injury far more likely. (In this case the hazard is the water on the floor, the interaction is standing in it, and the catalyst is working on energized equipment. You could also describe the energized equipment as the hazard and the water as the catalyst and be correct but now were talking semantics.)

Managing Hazards

Hazard management consists of eight steps:

1. Identification. The heart of hazard management is finding the hazards and containing them before anyone gets hurt. Unfortunately, we often learn of the existence of a hazard because someone has been injured. What’s more, hazards can be tricky: they come in all shapes and sizes; can grow and shrink with alarming speed; and can move throughout your facility or your process. They can crop up in different places, different times of day, and move across shifts.The best hazard identification process involves front-line supervision walking the work area and asking simple questions about where the process could fail. This is more than just observing workers’ behaviors, and involves taking a holistic look at the process and applying the 5 Ms of production (Manpower, machines, materials, methods, and environment—I never said the M was at the beginning of the word). Basically the front-line supervisor is conducting a process audit and gathering information on where the operation could fail.
2. Containment. Once a hazard has been found the person who discovers it should not leave the area until the hazard is contained. Documenting hazards without indicating how you contained them is a good way to get sued, but that notwithstanding how would you feel if someone was seriously injured because they interacted with a hazard that you knew about but did nothing? Containment actions are quick fixes designed to last only long enough for an unsafe condition to be fixed, so in many cases restricting access, warning employees or other similar low-level controls may be appropriate.
3. Root Cause Analysis. Before you can appropriately address a hazard you must know it’s primary root cause. I’ve noticed some confusion around Root Cause Analysis. Many people believe it is appropriate to look for a single cause of a hazard. This approach only makes sense if you have a specific problem structure with a sudden occurrence (things are going along just fine until a catalyst creates a problem). Unfortunately, the vast majority of hazards result from a broad problem structure with a gradual occurrence (the straw that breaks the camel’s back) where many interrelated causes and effects are at play. To make a long story well…less long, you usually have to look for multiple, interrelated causes of an injury.
4. Correction. Containment will only take you so far, and the ultimate goal of hazard management is to permanently correct hazards and keep them from coming back. Correction usually involves maintenance and all hazards are not created equally. The safety committee can work with maintenance to correctly prioritize hazard correction. For more on the safety meetings check out this weeks post on http://www.rockfordgreeneinternational.wordpress.com
5. Read-Across. Often a hazard that is present in one area of the organization is present in other departments as well, a solid process for read-across (checking to see where else the hazard might manifest) is a key step that many organizations miss. Read-across allows many areas to benefit from the discoveries of a single walk-thru.
6. Hazard Trend Analysis. Finding a single hazard is valuable, finding a trend that tells you where you are most at risk is invaluable. Hazard Trend Analysis should be the primary activity of the safety committee meeting, because it can help make the entire operation far more efficient.
7. Process Improvement. In world-class problem solving methodologies, they talk about the importance of fixing the system flaw that allowed the problem to manifest (for instance the recruiting and hiring policies that hire people who are physically unable to do the job.) This is step key in hazard management because fixing the system likely will prevent numerous problems down stream.

Remember as you implement a hazard management process to keep things simple. You will likely face considerable resistance as first line supervisors insist that they don’t have time to walk their areas and identify hazards. But if they don’t have time to do it right when will they find time to do it over, and ultimately when will they have time to stop work because of a worker injury?

Filed under: Loss Prevention, Phil La Duke, Safety, Worker Safety, containment, correction, hazard identification, hazard management, hazards, Phil La Duke, Phil LaDuke, Philip La Duke, Philip LaDuke, Process Improvement, Read across, Rockford Greene International, root cause analysis, safety meeting

La Duke’s 14 Points for Safety

Phil La Duke

by Phil La Duke

I am posting this as an extra (the official post for this week will be published at midnight tonight.—Phil

I have been trying for years to get Safety professionals to embrace the teachings of W. Edward Deming, specifically his 14 Points for Quality.  Deming’s points for quality are equally applicable to Safety, but for whatever reason my arguments have fallen on the deafest of ears.

Then it occurred to me.  Deming’s work was rooted in engineering discipline and process control but safety grew out of the Human Resources function.  This seemingly inconsequential difference has much to do with the state of Safety in the world and what needs to change. There’s a disconnect between HR and Engineering, a great and deep philosophical divide between the two.  Engineering is, at its purest core about change and improvement, it’s about continuous improvement.  Human Resources (as much as some may argue) is about keeping things the same.  A good Human Resources professional understands that change introduces dangerous variation into the a well oiled machine; it’s the job of HR to make sure that change isn’t capricious and more importantly that it doesn’t violate laws, unevenly apply policy, or a host of other dangers associated with change.  For centuries, the Human Resources function has been about governing the workforce, and organizational change is very disruptive.

I don’t mean to sound like Human Resources is incapable of leading change, it can and does lead successfully lead change all the time. It’s just that Human Resources as a function tends to be invested in the status quo.

Every organization needs a good mix of innovators and administrators, the innovators shake things up and the administrators find a way to make sense of it all and keep the organization running.  Engineering and lean practioners tend to believe that you can’t make an omelets without breaking some eggs while the human resources and safety professionals believe that if it aint broke don’t fix it. Of course these are generalities, and I am speaking of historical tendency (read: I am not talking about ever mammal who works or has ever worked in these functions)  but these parallel evolutions of these two disciplines explain why the Safety function finds it so difficult to lead meaningful change in the organization.

With that in mind, with apologies to W. Edward Deming here are my fourteen points for safety:

1. All injuries are preventable—FMEA’s and other predictive tools should be used to identify areas of greatest risk and efforts should be made to reduce the risk of injuries to the lowest practical level.
2. Move beyond compliance—compliance with the government regulations is important and compliance tends to correlate to a process that is in control. But we can never mistake being compliant with being safe.
3. Focus on prevention. Preventing injuries is more efficient than reacting to them. Injuries are caused by failures in the system.  By managing hazards (procedural, behavioral, and mechanical) organizations can reduce unplanned downtime, injuries, and defects.
4. Instill universal ownership and accountability for safety.  Every job plays a role in ensuring workplace safety, and everyone must be answerable when processes and protocols fail to keep workers safe.
5. Imbed Safety into all activities.  Safety is neither a priority nor a goal, instead it is a criterion by which companies measure the efficacy of its efforts to be successful. Safety is a strategic business element that needs to be managed as scrupulously as Quality, Delivery, Cost, and Morale.
6. Shift the ownership of safety to Operations— Operations has the greatest control and oversight of the safety of the workplace. Operations leadership should conduct routine reviews of key safety metrics.
7. The absence of injuries does not necessarily denote the presence of safety. Safety is an expression of probability.  No situation is ever 100% risk free.
8. Avoid Shame and Blame Policies and Tactics. Workers do not want to get hurt and an organization’s processes are not deliberately designed to hurt workers; no amount of behavior modification will change this.
9. Invest in basic skills training. The best way to ensure worker safety is by providing them with good foundational training in the tasks they are routinely expected to do.
10. End safety gimmickry. Incentives should only be used to reward active participation in safety, not to reward an absence of reported injuries.
11. Stop comparing your safety performance to industry average. Measuring an organization’s safety record in safety relative to the company’s industry average are meaningless and should be abandoned. Instead, use a combination of lagging and leading indicators to get a more meaningful view of your overall performance in safety.
12. Seek to protect people from their mistakes. People make mistakes and not necessarily because they took foolish risks or ignored safety protocols. Look for ways to prevent people from being injured by mistakes rather than preventing the mistakes themselves.
13. Support Operations.  Safety must be a key resource to Operations. Instead of impeding Operations and hampering its progress safety must support Operations to find safe ways of accomplishing organizational goals instead of work at cross purposes with production.
14. Cease attempts to manipulate worker’s behaviors. Safety is not about managing people’s behavior; it’s about managing risk. Behavioral psychology is over used and frequently misused in commercial safety solutions.

I have several more that I could add, but if 14 was enough for Deming than who am I to try to surpass the great man’s work?  I have said with irritating frequency that the Safety function must change if it is to survive. I believe wholeheartedly that the implementation of these 14 things can help the safety function not only to survive but to thrive.

Filed under: Behavior Based Safety, Loss Prevention, Phil La Duke, Safety, Safety Culture, Worker Safety, Attitude, Deming, Phil La Duke, Phil LaDuke, Philip LaDuke

You Say You Want a Revolution

“If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you aint gonna make it with anyone anyhow”—John Lennon

There are a lot of people in the safety world that are calling for change.  Typically this call for change is articulated in fairly gentle and vague terms. “We need leadership commitment” or “communication is key” leads the parade of platitudes.  This is harmless but it doesn’t accomplish much beyond making the safety professional feel and, to a lesser extent, sound engaged.  All these calls are likely to change precisely squat.

Changing from a culture where safety is for wimps, safety is too expensive and disruptive, or that safety is in any other way undesirable can not be an iterative process; in short this kind of change takes revolution, not evolution. When Deming first promoted his 14 points for Quality, he was far from universally accepted

Revolutions sound scary—the word conjures up images of guillotines and firing squads. But the business world has seen the quality revolution, the Lean Revolution, and the information revolution all brought exciting possibilities with them.  But even these weren’t bloodless coups.  As a new philosophy takes hold the business axioms they replace fight like wounded badgers for survival.

“All Change Comes From the Barrel of A Gun”—Mao Tse Tung

While the Utopian view of safety that many safety thought-leaders espouse sounds nice, few in the workforce see a compelling reason to change how they conduct themselves relative safety and without a compelling reason there can be no lasting change. As a former colleague used to put it, change comes when the pain of not changing exceeds the pain of changing. Or as noted culture expert, Edgar Shein, put it in his first fundamental law of change, “Principle 1: survival anxiety or guilt must be greater than learning anxiety” So in other words, nothing is going to change as long as people are either satisfied with the way things are or are too scared of what the future holds. A few worried safety professionals hunched over computers arguing over the finer points doesn’t foment the necessary discontent with the status quo to change a $10 bill let alone a culture.

Shein’s formula for organization can be loosely stated as:

D+V+N>R

where D=discontent, V=Vision for the Ideal State, and N=next steps and R=Resistance

Fomenting Discontent

Fomenting discontent in the organization means walking a line between being an agent for change and being a discontented and uncooperative turd who is unable to play well with others.  Additionally, organizations like organisms tend to have built in systems for defending themselves.  Changing a culture requires fortitude; it doesn’t take many missteps for the organization to turn on the fomenter of discontent.

Cast the Vision

Fomenting discontent without articulating a clear and compelling vision of how things could be, but are not. Casting a vision of a future state requires leadership, creativity and courage.  Unless one can question one’s most cherished beliefs, one’s most deeply held values, one can never hope to change a culture.  One has to look into the very eyes of God and call him fraud before one can honestly craft a vision of any real validity.  Casting the vision takes guts, in questioning the status quo one risks making blood enemies, because it’s one thing to question one’s own beliefs and values, but quite another to question someone else’s.

Articulate the Next Steps

A vision for what must happen and a healthy level of discontent alone can not lead the population to the Promised Land.  A leader must communicate a clear and reasonable roadmap for moving from the current state to the desired state.  Unless a leader can do so, the population will judge the change too risky and decide against adopting it.

Changing a culture is relatively easy to the far more daunting task of building an infrastructure for sustaining it. The safety snake oils are often able to fob off a climate change with a culture change.  Unlike a culture change, which the population typically defend a climate change will only last as long as the antecedent remains present. (Think of a climate change as exemplified by the speed trap.  Traffic slows because drivers know a policeman is laying in wait, but once the policeman is no longer present, the drivers resume speeding.) Culture change consultants love climate change because if the parasitic relationship between consultant ends so too does the change; it’s as if the consultant is able to repossess the services rendered.

The ability to sustain a culture change—without adding a complicated and expensive infrastructure or dramatically adding headcount—is what separates a good culture change initiative from a sham, climate change, smoke and mirrors.  Millions are spent on shoddy, junk science solutions that merely mask the problems in an organization and create climate change.

One must be prepared to topple the regime to effect change, but regime change isn’t the same as culture change. And a failed coup usually ends in the termination of those who attempted it.  Safety professionals who attempt to change the culture (even if they are successful) seldom survive the change.  Who needs revolutionaries after the revolution has succeeded?  While people will eventually accept change, they seldom forgive the person responsible for it.

Filed under: Phil La Duke, Safety, Safety Culture, Worker Safety, culture change, organizational development, Phil La Duke, Phil LaDuke, Philip La Duke, Philip LaDuke, Rockford Greene Interational, Safety Culture, Worker Safety