If It Feels Like Blame and Shame…It Is

By Phil La Duke

Blame isn’t pretty

A few weeks ago, I posted “A @#$@ Storm In Texas” a commentary on how alarming it was that The Boston Marathon drew so much media and public attention while the explosion of a fertilizer plant in West, Texas garnered almost no attention outside the professional safety community.  In the introduction that is required when sharing a link in a LinkedIn discussion thread I made the comment that it was time for Safety professionals to “step up or shut up”.  My comment was directed at those safety professionals who, for years, had been bragging up the decrease in worker injuries and “flat” fatalities as if they had single-handedly had ushered in a Golden Age of worker safety.  My contention was that if one claims credit for one circumstance (in this case safety improvements) one must shoulder the blame for circumstances that are disastrous.  I didn’t even imply that safety professionals were responsible for these disasters, and most safety professionals didn’t take it as an accusation.

The harder I tried to point out that if the mouth breathers had actually read the post with even them most rudimentary reading comprehension skills they would understand that I wasn’t assigning blame to anyone in this post. Still the outrage persisted; people who look to take offense will seldom be disappointed.

This is generally where an author writes some simpering apology detailing all the regret that his words may have caused some of the readers; screw that.  I stand by what I WROTE and bear no guilt for what someone infers from my writing, and frankly those who took offense did so solely of there own volition. Whether it be because of fragile egos, general neediness, penchants for drama-queen hissy fits, or legitimate guilty conscious, I refuse to plea mea culpa for something I neither said nor intended. This week, with its flood of crybaby hate mail helped me to realize a deeper truth about one of my favorite targets: Behaviour-Based Safety (BBS).

One of the strongest criticisms of BBS is that it “blames the worker”, this tends to be dismissed by BBS proponents as patently untrue and a construct of organized labour who, they contend, oppose BBS because it holds workers accountable for unsafe behaviours.  For the record, I don’t speak for organized labour, but their opposition to BBS goes far beyond the propensity, in its mind, for BBS to blame the workers.  Furthermore, it isn’t just organized labour that accuse BBS of fomenting a “blame and shame” environment.  So who’s right? I really struggled with this, because a) some really bright people who I respect immensely support BBS and they assure me that BBS doesn’t blame workers for injuries and b) I have first-hand knowledge of BBS systems that HAVE created environments where workers feel as if they are being blamed for being injured.

Intent Is Meaningless

The backlash from the Texas post taught me a lot about blame and shame, and, in so doing, taught me a lot about BBS and blame. First, and most importantly, if someone feels blamed and shamed, they ARE blamed and shamed.  Blame is something someone does, but the resulting shame is a feeling wholly originating within the recipient. We can’t control how we FEEL and if we feel that we are being blamed than our emotional reaction is the same as if we were actually being blamed.  So perception, not intention is key.  Whether or not I intend to blame someone for being injured—and this applies not just to BBS but to any safety system where workers feel as if they are being punished, denied reward, or ostracized for an injury—is effectively immaterial, what matters is whether or not the other person feels blamed.  It should matter whether or not we intend to create those feelings, but it doesn’t; if people feel persecuted there really isn’t any emotional difference between that state and instances where the person is indeed being persecuted.  It’s a bit like the old saying, “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that everyone isn’t out to get you”; perception IS reality.

Right and Wrong Don’t Matter

Emotions are powerful, often ugly things.  Hit someone at a visceral level and you are likely to see a side of them you would have preferred had gone forever undisclosed.  Whether the person has correctly interpreted your words and intentions or is so far off base that they leave you wondering if they are from this planet, in the end it doesn’t matter if they are right or wrong in their conclusions, the emotion still remains and we need to deal with them.

Guilt By Proxy

People love incentive programs—I’ve seen grown men and women sink to the pettiest of indignities for a free baseball hat with a logo on it or some dopey trinket that they neither want nor need—but even the finest incentive program can leave feeling people left out, blamed, and victimized simply because they didn’t get a prize.  The person who blows the safety BINGO by being injured may feel blamed and shamed (irrespective of intent, stay with me people). Even the person who doesn’t get recognized for contributing a suggestion to make the work place safety may intensely resent the person who receives the award who eventually begins to feel blamed.

When Is Enough Truly Enough

Political correctness and sensitivity witch-hunts happen when an organization worries so much about the potential for offending a minority of the population that it takes ridiculous measures to prevent anyone from ever possibly taking offense.  Should we buckle under to the pressure to make sure that no one gets offended? It will come, I’m sure, as no surprise that I think people should grow up.  I am against any attempt to deliberately offend people for offense’s sake, but do we really have to shut down programs that the wide majority of the people in our organization like and enjoy simply because someone complains? I think not.  Sometimes people just need to feel the hurt and let it go.  The real question is how much inadvertent blame and hurt feelings can your organization tolerate? Emotions are powerful and difficult to defuse and they can lead to everything to strikes to workplace violence, so we can’t just decide to let the crybabies whine.  Where is the line between common sense and political correctness? I don’t know and frankly that is really for each organization to decide, but as is so often the case I don’t know where the line is until after I have crossed it.

Filed under: Safety, BBS, Behavior Based Safety, Behaviour Based Safety, blame, blame and incentives, Criticisms of BBS, Safety Incentives, 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

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

Is BBS just BS?

By Phil La Duke

Recently I was contacted by a student who is earning his degree in preparation for a career in Environmental Health & Safety.  He was given an assignment during his internship to research why Unions oppose Behavior Based Safety (BBS). It seems that in preparing for the assignment he happened across some of my writings that are critical of BBS and he wanted to know why I was so critical of BBS when so much of what I criticized would never be a part of what he was taught was not part of an “effective BBS program”.

First of all, I must applaud the young man for contacting me and asking me to defend my point of view.  I find that the on-going polarization in the debate in safety makes it rare that anyone actually seeks out opposing points of view; it would have been much easier to denounce me as uninformed, a nut, or provocative for provocation’s sake.  That having been said, I was alarmed that so many professors are still teaching BBS as undisputed fact.  This young man described me as one of the few opponents of BBS  he could find.  This is troubling on several levels.  I know of a growing number of people who are increasingly disenchanted with BBS but they openly tell me that they will not publicly criticize it because of the fanatics who shout down all other opinions or research that does not support their world view. In my writing, I admit that I have used very basic criticism of BBS because most people don’t even understand this very rudimentary criticism.

I believe (and I am not by any means alone in this) that BBS is inherently flawed; it’s a dead technology—even in its current state.  Its foundation is based on the erroneous and misleading statistic that 95% of injuries is caused by unsafe behavior.  Most experts that I know doubt the methodology that drew this conclusion. Along the same lines, the methodology Heinrich used to build his pyramid was species and is generally thought to be little more than one man’s opinion (that he reached after asking supervisors for their opinion with no scientific method to back up). Heinrich’s theories are on the periphery of BBS, but I believe there are substantial parallels in methodology.  Anecdotal data isn’t reliable.  Before you cite further studies, I will tell you that I have no respect for research conducted by companies and pundits who have billions in revenue at stake.  How likely are we to ever see the findings should the research prove that BBS is bunk?  I understand the argument that I have criticized older methods; I have heard that over and over again. But given that any criticism I make on a basic level draws, “that’s not the way we do BBS anymore” I remain unmoved. This response is like someone telling me the reason I don’t like eating squirrel and opossum anuses is because I just haven’t had them cooked right. After a while it gets to be like hitting a moving target…forgive me if I don’t continue to seek out the perfectly cooked and seasoned squirrel anus.

And despite the apparently underground outpouring of support for BBS, critics persist. Many companies famous for advocating BBS continue to be accused of encouraging under-reporting of injuries.  BP was once the shining example of BBS successes, do I really have to trot out its safety record?

Too many people continue to make corrections to there BBS as it fails; it’s flawed. It’s time to move past it, salvage what works, and discard the rest.

In other writings, I’ve said the following before, but just to be clear:

• BBS is based on behavior modification.  When I say this, I either get one of two responses: “so what?” or “you’re over simplifying it”. Most behavior modification experiments ignore how people behave in populations, and safety is about how populations behave, not individuals. Nobody has ever satisfactorily answered this criticism and generally dismiss the statement by telling me that I don’t know what I am taking about.  Illuminate me.

• People make mistakes; it’s a biological fact.  The reason people make mistakes is NOT because they are being careless. Current theory on mistake making is that the brain deliberately causes us to subconsciously test the safety of adapting by making little experiments.  Sometimes we call them discoveries and sometimes we call them mistakes.  All the observations, and reminders, and training, and all elements of BBS will not change the fact that people make mistakes, but we spend a fortune trying to; it’s misguided.

• People take risks, and that’s a good thing.  People get up in the morning, they drive to work, they take short cuts, they take risks.  Taking risks are a necessary part of the workplace and BBS tends to pretend that it isn’t.  We need to do a better job of training workers to take risks appropriately and stop telling them to not take risks when we know that they will.

• People wander away from the standards.  As we perform routine tasks we drift from the standard, BBS tries to address this, but does so amateurishly and ham-fistedly that it is difficult to take it seriously. Basic exercises designed to teach the difficulty in maintaining a standard easily demonstrate the impossibility of sticking to a standard when faced with variability in human behavior.

• There needs to be a greater focus on protecting people from mistakes. Instead of trying to shape behaviors, organizations should manage the things that tend to cause people to make more mistakes. This approach would not only improve safety but would also improve productivity and quality and other factors as well.

• One-Size Does Not Fit All.  BBS tends to take a one-size-fits approach, there isn’t an industry, environment, or population that the fanatics won’t claim that BBS is the answer, often before they even know the question.

All that being said, I think that there are elements of BBS that can be useful, but not as long as fanatics keep proselytizing BBS at all costs. There is such a strong population who will not listen to anything that does not proclaim the sanctity of BBS that most of the critics of BBS (and there are lots of us) have stopped talking.

Did you enjoy this blog? Did you find it thought provoking? Why not share it on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn or by sending it to friends and colleagues via email.  I would sure appreciated it and I’m sure they would too.

Filed under: Behavior Based Safety, Loss Prevention, Safety, BBS, flaws of Behavior Based Safety, Safety, Worker Safety