Seven Ways To Tell If BBS Is Right For You

Author: I Know My Shoes Are Untied! Mind Your Own Business. An Iconoclast’s View of Workers’ Safety.
Lone Gunman: Rewriting the Handbook On Workplace Violence Prevention
Blood In My P

As many of you know I rarely miss a chance to take a cheap shot at Behavior Based Safety so it might surprise you that I am writing an article that supports the use of BBS in some circumstances.  

There are indeed many circumstances where BBS isn’t just the right system it’s the ONLY system for you.  So how can you know if  BBS is the right system? By answering these five questions:

1. Does my customer make me? There are many large, often global, customers who insist that—along with random drug testing—a vendor must have a BBS system in place.  Some vacuous, empty suit made this decision after his or her head was filled with nonsense by people who are faculty members of distinction from sixth-rate universities that churn out fecal books praising BBS more frequently than irritable bowel syndrome patient who had too much coffee after a hard night of tequila and bad burritos drops a load.  If you have read any of these books you know how apt the analogy is. These authors have never had to actually WORK in safety, nor have they run a safety department, in fact, none of them have actually been held accountable when their advice crashes and burns.
2. Does my boss make me? There are a lot of really stupid Safety Executives who can’t pour piss out of a boot with the instruction written on the bottom.  They want to command safety without knowing much about it besides the dreck that oozes out of professional conferences and is filtered by the people who actually attended the conference.  These bosses will LOVE BBS because its message is simple “it’s the workers’ fault.”
3. Do I value activity over results? If you want to LOOK busy without actually doing anything of value BBS is the system for you. You collect quantitative data with the vigor and zeal of a squirrel gathering acorns for the winter. But you don’t understand what the data means. What’s more, you don’t care. Your job is to make sure that supervisors watch workers and issue them a card for all the mistakes they made. You can make charts and display them in the break rooms or wherever you have the “safety meeting.”  And the best thing is you can blame the workers for getting injured and complain loudly about how overworked you are.
4. Do I believe that people are gods, incapable of making mistakes? A central tenet of BBS is that 85% or 90% pr 95% of all injuries are the results of human error, and by extension carelessness, stupidity, fatigue, sabotage, and a host of other deliberate actions and poor judgments made by the worker. Of course, YOU have never done something while operating on autopilot.  You think about each step required to make a sandwich and you think about everything that could go wrong as you make the sandwich.  And when you drive, not only do you have to make a conscious decision about what to do at every traffic sign or signal, and have to consult the driver’s manual to operate the turn signal.  Nothing you do is automatic and all your decisions are perfect and based on perfect information.
5. Do I understand the difference between philosophical safety and operational safety? Platitudes like “Safety is our number one priority”, “Safety is job one”, etc. are philosophical. Shy of the psychopathic drones in the workplace nobody would disagree that safety is better than rampant hazards run amuck. But Operational safety is results driven and seeks to fix the problems, not the blame.
6. Do I have a lack of respect for the scientific method? Let me begin by explaining how the scientific method works. You select two groups from your population that have enough people to be statistically relevant (don’t freak out there is a website that will calculate all that depending on your margin of error). Next, randomly decide which group will be the experimental group and which will be the control group.  Next, you would, in this case, use BBS on the experimental group and do nothing different from what had been done to the control group.  After a couple of months, you compare the results of the two groups.  If the experimental group shows meaningful improvement but the control group shows no improvement BBS has worked. If however,  both groups have either shown no improvement or meaningful improvement then BBS did not make a difference.  If all of this sounds confusing or like a waste of time, then BBS is right for you.
   Here is the point where I should mention that trying to do these kinds of experiments on actual people who could actually get seriously injured is incredibly unethical and behavioral scientists are notorious for making dubious decisions when it comes to ethics so trying to employ this type of experiment is of questionable value.
7. Am I lazy? I once had a client whose safety manager would completely end a conversation with “I don’t know” he was as lazy as a neutered housecat. He was always late for work and always left early.  He LOVED BBS because it required so little of his time, but actively resisted an organizational development initiative because he was held accountable for doing his job.  

So as much as I criticize BBS there are still a lot of good uses for it if you can answer yes to one or more of these questions it might just mean that BBS is a good fit for you and your “organization”.

Dear Readers:

I have been writing this blog since 2006 and have been very resistant to accepting advertising revenue for it.  Some of you may think that I’m stupid for doing so, but I just don’t think I can remain impartial on the topics I address if I am receiving revenue from advertisers that are selling something with which I am philosophically or fundamentally against. 

It gets to be a drag writing post after post week after week, especially for no compensation—people tend to see things that they get for free as having no value.  So if you enjoy this blog I hope you will consider buying one or more of my books.  I don’t make much on these books (the perils of being actually published versus self-published) but I gauge my relevance (rightly or wrongly) based on my book sales.  If you have already purchased one or more of my books, thank you.  You have my heartfelt gratitude and what you hopefully see as at least a book that was worth the purchase price.  But even you can help me if you are so inclined by writing a review of my book (even if you hated it) on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Goodreads, or even in a LinkedIn Post.

And no, I won’t hold it against you if you just continue to read the blog and occasionally find the opportunity to think about what I’ve written.

Just after finishing my last book, Blood In My Pocket Is Blood On Your Hands (a book that everyone who LOVES BBS should read) I began writing a book on mass violence. It has taken me 2 years to write it because I reviewed mountains of research and true experts on the subject (one of which is a friend of mine from high school who, as it happens, is retired from the FBI where he was Special Agent In Charge of Counterterrorism (which included domestic terrorists like the idiots who are shooting up schools and concerts and…well you get the point). The name has morphed but we landed on “Stop. Don’t Shoot!” it’s fascinating reading and will be out very soon I promise. I am worried about the proliferation of so-called experts telling people to do the dumbest things imaginable during a rampage attack and you should be too. My book isn’t the only book out there on the subject it’s simple the best. Look for it coming soon.

—Thanks, Phil

#attitudes-toward-safety, #behavior-based-safety, #behaviour-based-safety, #bullshit, #free-porn, #phil-la-duke, #safety, #worker-safety

Three Weeks Ago I Killed My Brother

By Phil La Duke 

Author: I Know My Shoes Are Untied! Mind Your Own Business. An Iconoclast’s View of Workers’ Safety.
Lone Gunman: Rewriting the Handbook On Workplace Violence Prevention
Blood In My Pockets Is Blood On Your Hands

Contributor: 1% Safer

My brother Tom was found dead in his driveway (probably higher than Cypress HIll at a pre-Grammy party) of an apparent massive heart attack.  He was 67 and apart from being dead, he was in excellent health. But if I finally succumb to the tidal wave of stupidity mixed with red algae and raw sewage that is Behavior-Based Safety, I killed him.  But first a bit about my brother the human being who was taken from us too soon.

Tom died about a quarter-mile from the house in which we grew up in Hooterville.  The Hooterville police speculated that Tom was perhaps getting ready to mow his lawn.  It was a fine piece of detective work—the lawn was freshly mowed and he lay dead with his glasses lying between him and his lawn mower. It doesn’t take a forensic expert to determine that Tom wasn’t about to mow his lawn a second time. My guess is that he was on his way to his dig or to dinner.

Tom was a complex person, at times open and others intensely private. He worked at Great Lakes Steel for years working a swing shift and waking him up when he was working midnights could LITERALLY get you killed. When the mill closed Tom had every intention of going back, but when they issued the return to work order he confided in me that he would rather retire than go back to a swing shift (“swing”  makes it sounds fun but it isn’t).

When Tom retired he spent most of his time on archeological digs.  Tom was a self-taught paleontologist and was consulted by some of the most noted paleontologists in the U.S.  His work proved the existence of Paleo man in Michigan 10,000 years earlier than it was previously believed. He wrote at least one paper that was published in a scholarly journal and has a generally accepted theory (named for him) about how he was able to find Paleolithic artifacts in an area that was believed to be covered in water. He was an engaging speaker and highly sought after among this crowd of nerds.

Tom and I shared a love of storytelling and we talked about music, food, history—just about everything. I learned so much from him. He is the primary reason I don’t do drugs—he warned me about the harder drugs when I was ten, apparently believing that I was ready to head to the Hooterville heroin shooting gallery.

He was a star high-school athlete and played college football until he lost his financial aid because of a shoulder injury.  His latest hobby was writing crackpot articles (his words not mine) to the New York Times just to screw with them.

When Tom and I became adults we eventually became incredibly close. Tom and I differed on politics but could discuss them maturely with no acrimony. It helped that Tom thought social media was for idiots who needed to be told what to think.  I’m sure he wasn’t talking about me but yeah, the rest of you…

Tom had many, many friends of all ages and descriptions; and he also had a notable number of enemies, but what great man doesn’t?  (Tom loved that the asshat that tried to get Hooterville to condemn his house so he could swindle it away from him) died suddenly one Thanksgiving.) 

Tom was absolutely the least materialistic person I have ever known. His shoes and clothes were held together with duct tape, and he lived in squalor that is the thing of legends; it absolutely defies description. I know, I lived with him in a sort of a weird hippy commune while I was married and unemployed; fun it was not.

Tom loved animals more than most people.  I don’t mean that Tom really loved animals (though he did) more than other people loved animals, I mean he liked animals more than he liked most people. He could be kind and he could be vicious; he had a cutting wit that makes mine look kind and bland.

He spoke his mind and never suffered fools lightly, while at the same time being generous to an extreme. He loved burritos and was an excellent cook (although he never cooked at home).

I was always puzzled when people worried about “Big Brother watching them” I would always say, “What’s the big deal, when my big brother watched me he would get high and listen to music and let me do whatever I wanted.” Mostly my brother was a human being who was loved by his family and friends—just like the people injured and killed in the workplace. He didn’t, as they don’t, need some armchair psychologist clucking tongues at the fact that the behavior failed and not the hackney BBS system they are clinging to like it was their first born infant.

But according to what seems to be the majority of the Safety Industry and their zombie-like devotion to the cult of Behavior-Based Safety (or the derivative du jour) I killed my brother.  I could have been out there observing him while he worked. I could have coached him not to die. I could have made a crayon drawing reminding him how much his siblings, nieces, nephews, and great-nieces and nephews loved him and didn’t want him to die.  We reject the idea that sometimes people just die; that when one’s number is up it’s up.

Make no mistake if the logic of BBS is sound then I killed my brother, as did my other siblings, cousins, and well anyone who didn’t intercede. So now along with the void and sadness and loss, I have to feel the guilt of killing him. Or does this fetid pile of manure only apply to the workplace? If so why are we driving so much of it toward “safety in the home”. 

Many of you reading this will explain it away with a wave of disdain and think, “this guy just doesn’t get it.”  Well, this guy does get it. What’s more, I feel all the pain and uncertainty of someone close to me dying suddenly. No witnesses and no autopsy means no answers, just like when someone dies at work.

BBS isn’t science. It is a shame of the lowest order.  Nobody ever asks WHY a person behaves unsafely they merely lay a wreath of blame on the injured or deceased person.  Some say you can’t really put a price on human life, but the BBS consultants and firms have put a price on a single human life and they will money grub while deflecting blame. According to the logic of the dimwitted devotees of BBS, all gun violence could be ended by simply reminding people not to go on a rampage attack; the whole philosophy is garbage but since it’s easy to monetize and convince simple-minded executives that all you need to do is to condition workers to salivate at a bell every time you have a pizza party.

Oh, and I didn’t kill my brother and I miss him terribly.

Don’t mourn my loss—celebrate the man who I had the absolute privilege to have in my life for all these many years—the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Most of all he lived life on his own terms and adventured through a life well-lived.

Tom was the smartest person I ever met. Now I guess I am.

Dear Readers:

I have been writing this blog since 2006 and have been very resistant to accepting advertising revenue for it.  Some of you may think that I’m stupid for doing so, but I just don’t think I can remain impartial on the topics I address if I am receiving  revenue from advertisers that are selling something with which I am philosophically or fundamentally against. 

It gets to be a drag writing post after post week after week especially for no compensation—people tend to see things that they get for free as having no value.  So if you enjoy this blog I hope you will consider buying one or more of my books.  I don’t make much on these books (the perils of being actually published versus self-published) but I gauge my relevance (rightly or wrongly) based on my book sales.  If you have already purchased one or more of my books, thank you.  You have my heartfelt gratitude and what you hopefully see as at least a book that was worth the purchase price.  But even you can help me if you are so inclined by writing a review of my book (even if you hated it) on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Goodreads, or even in a LinkedIn Post.

And no, I won’t hold it against you if you just continue to read the blog and occasionally find the opportunity to think about what I’ve written,

WARNING: What follows may just teach you something but you won’t get any CEUs for it, you’ll just be better educated and informed but seriously who wants or needs that?

Some time ago, I read an article in the Metro Times (a Detroit Weekly) about a Facebook group essentially dedicated to encouraging attacks on women, Democrats, Muslims, and LGBTQ persons. There were hundreds of specific threats of violence. You don’t have to buy my book, but I wish you would. But if you want to help follow this link. Search LinkedIn to find out where these people work and encourage their employers to fire them. This isn’t a political statement, I would react the same way if people were saying that White Heterosexual Christian Men were the targets. Purveyors of hate need to feel real-world consequences. All it takes for evil to triumph is for good to do nothing.

Violent acts begin with violent thoughts that turn into violent posts on social media. How long are you going to continue to throw your hands up and say, “what can I do?” My second book, Lone Gunman: Rewriting the Handbook On Workplace Violence Prevention. answers this question. This is all new material that cannot be found anywhere else. In light of all the talk and panic around gun violence, and the shamefully bad advice some “experts” are giving I hope some of you will read it and pass it along to your executives and HR leads (go ahead, expense it, they will be glad you did.)

Before you dismiss this as yet another shameless plug for my book I want you to ask yourself these questions:

What if anything is my employer doing to reduce its risk of a workplace attack?

Do the people who are doing the hiring at my workplace know the warning signs of a workplace attack?

What can I do to prevent workplace violence?

If you don’t have the answer to any of these questions, use your Amazon gift card to buy the book. It can be purchased in hardcover or paperback at Amazon or Barnes & Noble

I should warn you, this isn’t a book that is pro- or anti-gun ownership rights. The book has extensive sections on spotting an unstable employee (some people’s lives will take a dark and desperate turn long after you have hired them but there are always signs), the types of work environments that tend to trigger these events, and I recently returned from Dublin, Ireland where I spoke on how companies can leverage technology to protect workers from workplace violence. But all the books, magazines, and speeches in the world won’t change a damned thing if you keep thinking that it can’t (or probably won’t) happen to you or someone you love. You can bet your life that we will see more similar shootings in the weeks or months as people who are currently at the brink of sanity see the news reports and think, “now’s the time”. WAKE UP, PEOPLE!!!! This book is peppered with the sarcasm, and self-deprecating humor of the first book, but it also makes use of my extensive knowledge of violence prevention in the workforce (that I gained as head of training and OD for a global manufacturer.) You should buy it.

#behaviour-based-safety, #blame, #phil-la-duke, #safety, #the-blame-game, #worker-safety

The Safety Thought Police

Author: I Know My Shoes Are Untied! Mind Your Own Business. An Iconoclast’s View of Workers’ Safety.
Lone Gunman: Rewriting the Handbook On Workplace Violence Prevention
Blood In My Pockets Is Blood On Your Hands

Contributor: 1% Safer

I haven’t been writing much lately, well that isn’t exactly true. I have been writing a lot.  I am working on three books simultaneously and writing articles for Entrepreneur and Authority, but they aren’t the kind of topics or tone people are used to seeing here. So I thought I would put a burr under the establishment and address the real problem of the Safety Circle Jerk.

Dissent is essential to intellectual discourse and unfortunately, we have scarce little dissent in the world of worker safety.

I have been openly critical of the homogenization of thought perpetuated by “professional” organizations but I haven’t yet mentioned academia.  Let me begin by taking another jab at the “professional” organizations that are anything but professional.  Someone once had the great idea that people who had the word “safety” in their titles ought to know at least a little something about safety. This is, was, and will always be a great idea…in concept. I say “in concept” because the execution of the idea has been C– work at best. 

What was once meant to ensure that the people responsible for implementing safety programs were indeed qualified—either because of college education, certificate program, or years of experience—for the job for which they were hired. Like most certificate programs, many of these required Continuing Education Units (CEUs) which in my opinion are essential for keeping safety practitioners apprised of the latest breakthroughs in the field of safety.

Unfortunately, the thirst for CEUs has led to a stampede of people who only care about checking the box.  They don’t care if the topic of a speech is accurate, thought-provoking, or useful as long as they get that all-important CEU.  There are people out there who don’t give a damn whether or not they learn anything, gain insights into a complex issue, or even that they get ideas on how to solve a problem with which they are struggling. And for the record, this is not me crying “sour grapes” of my many years as a speaker at the national events I have never once not qualified for the award of CEUs.  But here is what irks me: professional organizations are the people who decide what courses qualify for CEUs. So there is at very least an ethical concern here if not an outright conflict of interest.

I contacted ASSP about having my books available for sale at their annual national meetings.  I received a condescending note that in effect read that the reviewers didn’t like my tone or “lack of professionalism”.  In my mind, the only criteria that should have mattered were whether or not the books were on the topic of safety, not whether or not the self-proclaimed intelligentsia of safety liked the book or not.  I wasn’t asking for them to endorse my books (I rather prefer that they don’t) just put them on a table and let people have an opportunity to buy them.  You can dismiss me as throwing a fit because they didn’t like my book. Maybe I am, but it pisses me off that these self-important, pedantic, waterheads are trying to restrict the diversity of opinion.  I have to ask myself how many other speakers and authors are the ASSP thought police trying to suppress? 50? 1,000? 10,000? Do they actually think that what they offer for sale (and by the way they would take the lion’s share of the proceeds so if you are thinking this is about money, think again) is somehow an endorsement? All it is is an endorsement of multiple points of view.

I cannot shake the feeling that I am no longer welcome as a speaker, contributor to their magazine and that my books cannot be offered through their online bookstore has more to do with my attack on the big lie of BBS and my criticisms of their most cherished heresy Zero Injuries than my tone and level of professionalism. My books deal with issues facing safety (I Know My Shoes Are Untied Mind Your Own Business), workplace violence prevention and how it connects to domestic abuse (Lone Gunman: Rewriting the Handbook On Workplace Violence Prevention), and the danger of safety incentives (Blood In My Pockets Is Blood On Your Hands).  I can only assume that since ASSP has blacklisted me (although they deny it) they are in favor of poor safety practices, workplace violence, programs that lead to fraudulent injury reporting, and anything else that contradicts the opinions of the corporate sponsors.  The thought police have decided that it is better to have conferences, events, and magazine articles that are based on Pol Pot’s reeducation philosophies than they are on fomenting intelligent debate on cherished, sacred, safety practices. 

The first step toward a dictatorship is to destroy anyone who disagrees with the status quo.  But who gives a rat’s ass as long as the safety drones get those precious, precious CEUs. At least once a day I read or view something that flies in the face of what I believe. In every case, I ask myself are these sources wrong, or has my own belief-set blinded me to the truth.  If I decide that they are indeed wrong, I ask myself, are they completely wrong? If so, why? What argument would I make to demonstrate the problem with their messages? If I find that they aren’t completely wrong, I try to determine the kernels of truth on which I can build something. 

For the record I’m not special, I am not above anyone, I’m smarter than some and dumber than others, but it worries me that these voices are silenced in favor of toadies who agree just to be accepted. As for the National Safety Council, they are beneath contempt. They are more bordello than any sort of organization—leering salaciously at any corporate sponsor they can con into being their John with a couple of bucks who is bereft enough of any self-respect that he will ignore the disease-ridden to give in to his prurient carnal proclivities no matter how repulsive. Coastal is a sponsor and coincidentally a “partner” of the cult of personality that is Scott Gellar. Doctor Gellar is a perennial speaker who has been regurgitating his same poisonous nonsense for the last two decades—but despite complaints of those who attend the NSC is not about to deny him a choice speaking spot—this is what they want you to believe.

Okay, so now let’s take a look at academia. Let me start by saying that there are scarce few college professors who teach safety and who never set foot on a workplace floor.  Many (and since I haven’t done the research I can’t prove that most, but I suspect it to be true) are either adjunct faculty or left the work world and moved into academia.  

Life in academia isn’t easy. A student can complain about you and even tenured professors can be shown the door.  Some complaints should be taken seriously, but a complaint by a student that he or she didn’t like the message or that the professor was not speaking politically correctly should not.  Learning is often about challenging what you believe and making you uncomfortable.  Too many good professors have been forced out of their jobs by the safety circle jerks and this creates another generation of people who come into the field with their brains stuffed with the sanitized view of the world promulgated by the safety thought police.

I have a State of Michigan Certificate in Training Design and Development (Adult education which I thought would be dirty—you know, like the “Adult” film industry.) that I earned from the University of Michigan.  Unlike my other degrees that I have earned (no one has offered me an honorary degree) that taught me very little about how to actually do the job, this program was actually very helpful, and the fact that I was working full-time while earning my degrees. I could actually separate the highly applicable from the theoretical bullshit. But if all one is exposed to is the theoretical bullshit and never is exposed to any dissenting point of view what then will become of Safety?

But there is a sinister side to the course work in the college Safety curriculum. Here again, we have a handful of individuals spouting what they believe and ONLY what they believe. How many of you have met a newly indoctrinated college grad who knows EVERYTHING? And they know that they know EVERYTHING because a single professor told them that he or she was going to teach EVERYTHING that was worth knowing in the field of safety. This isn’t a course in basic anatomy that (with hopefully the scantest of exceptions) doesn’t have conflicting theories regarding the names of the bones in the human hands, and yet it is taught this way. College is supposed to teach critical thinking skills. These sham organizations are supposed to reinforce these critical thinking skills and teach people how to apply these skills but they are merely “pay-to-speak” informercials for whatever the “organization” wants you to think. And if there is anywhere where people need to sharpen their critical thinking skills it has to be the safety function.

It is said that when you sell hammers the whole world looks like a nail. Well I say, the only way to sell bullshit is to make sure that it is the only option offered, and when it is the only thing available you will be grateful to have bought (because of the CEUs) it but that does not change its basic nature or its source now does it?

An executive at my last company (who hired me and was my first boss) once caught a lot of flack because I bad mouthed a particular safety philosophy that more than one of the firm’s key clients (read: spends millions and millions with the firm) I didn’t mention the company for whom I worked, nor the client, nor any information even remotely close to giving away the parties tangentially involved. The other executives were on my boss’s boss’s boss like flies on shit. He was nonplussed and said, “We hired this guy for his thought leadership and you don’t get to be a thought leader by telling people what they want to hear.” I still feel good that he defended me and my work, but more than that I feel good that he got what I was about and understood that conflicting opinions are not only acceptable but essential.

Dear Readers:

I have been writing this blog since 2006 and have been very resistant to accepting advertising revenue for it.  Some of you may think that I’m stupid for doing so, but I just don’t think I can remain impartial on the topics I address if I am receiving revenue from advertisers that are selling something with which I am philosophically or fundamentally against. 

It gets to be a drag writing post after post week after week, especially for no compensation—people tend to see things that they get for free as having no value.  So if you enjoy this blog I hope you will consider buying one or more of my books.  I don’t make much on these books (the perils of being actually published versus self-published) but I gauge my relevance (rightly or wrongly) based on my book sales.  If you have already purchased one or more of my books, thank you.  You have my heartfelt gratitude and what you hopefully see as at least a book that was worth the purchase price.  But even you can help me if you are so inclined by writing a review of my book (even if you hated it) on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Goodreads, or even in a LinkedIn Post.

And no, I won’t hold it against you if you just continue to read the blog and occasionally find the opportunity to think about what I’ve written,

WARNING: What follows may just teach you something but you won’t get any CEUs for it, you’ll just be better educated and informed but seriously who wants or needs that?

Some time ago, I read an article in the Metro Times (a Detroit Weekly) about a Facebook group essentially dedicated to encouraging attacks on women, Democrats, Muslims, and LGBTQ persons. There were hundreds of specific threats of violence. You don’t have to buy my book, but I wish you would. But if you want to help follow this link. Search LinkedIn to find out where these people work and encourage their employers to fire them. This isn’t a political statement, I would react the same way if people were saying that White Heterosexual Christian Men were the targets. Purveyors of hate need to feel real-world consequences. All it takes for evil to triumph is for good to do nothing.

Violent acts begin with violent thoughts that turn into violent posts on social media. How long are you going to continue to throw your hands up and say, “what can I do?” My second book, Lone Gunman: Rewriting the Handbook On Workplace Violence Prevention. answers this question. This is all new material that cannot be found anywhere else. In light of all the talk and panic around gun violence, and the shamefully bad advice some “experts” are giving I hope some of you will read it and pass it along to your executives and HR leads (go ahead, expense it, they will be glad you did.)

Before you dismiss this as yet another shameless plug for my book I want you to ask yourself these questions:

What if anything is my employer doing to reduce its risk of a workplace attack?

Do the people who are doing the hiring at my workplace know the warning signs of a workplace attack?

What can I do to prevent workplace violence?

If you don’t have the answer to any of these questions, use your Amazon gift card to buy the book. It can be purchased in hardcover or paperback at Amazon or Barnes & Noble

I should warn you, this isn’t a book that is pro- or anti-gun ownership rights. The book has extensive sections on spotting an unstable employee (some people’s lives will take a dark and desperate turn long after you have hired them but there are always signs), the types of work environments that tend to trigger these events, and I recently returned from Dublin, Ireland where I spoke on how companies can leverage technology to protect workers from workplace violence. But all the books, and magazines, and speeches in the world won’t change a damned thing if you keep thinking that it can’t (or probably won’t) happen to you or someone you love. You can bet your life that we will see more similar shootings in the weeks or months as people who are currently at the brink of sanity see the news reports and think, “now’s the time”. WAKE UP, PEOPLE!!!! This book is peppered with the sarcasm, self-deprecating humor of the first book, but it also makes use of my extensive knowledge of violence prevention in the workforce (that I gained as head of training and OD for a global manufacturer.) You should buy it.

#assp, #attitude, #behavior-based-safety, #behaviour-based-safety, #culture-change, #fabricating-and-metalworking-magazine, #national-safety-council, #phil-la-duke, #safety, #safety-culture, #worker-safety

Let’s Blame God

By Phil La Duke 

Author: I Know My Shoes Are Untied! Mind Your Own Business. An Iconoclast’s View of Workers’ Safety.
Lone Gunman: Rewriting the Handbook On Workplace Violence Prevention
Blood In My Pockets Is Blood On Your Hands

Contributor: 1% Safer,

“Dear God, hope you get the letter and

I pray you can make it better down here

I don’t mean a big reduction in the price of beer

But all the people that you made in your image

See them starving on their feet

Cause they don’t get enough to eat from God”.—”Dear God” XTC

I didn’t enter the Safety field via the usual route, which I assume is running away from home, being picked up by a stranger at a bus depot who treats you nicely and when you tell him that you are hungry and have no place to stay and no place to go.  He takes you home and feeds you and gives you a place to sleep and lets you play video games all day and do pretty much what you want.  Then one day things turn ugly and the once kind stranger becomes aggressive and threatening. He lets you know in no uncertain terms that it’s time you earn your keep—or else. The next thing you know you are the safety specialist on a construction site, or factory floor, or a warehouse, or in a mine, or some other workplace.  You didn’t have a choice other than to take a job in safety or live on the streets. No, mine was a much different journey.

My first experience with safety was when I was working the line at the General Motors Fleetwood Plant in 1985.  There weren’t any safety people to speak of and if you did get hurt you were sent to medical and examined by a doctor who would give you an aspirin and treat you like the malingering oaf that he assumed you were. This left an indelible stamp on my impression of the Safety trade—I later learned that the safety practitioner was a failed beautician and brother of one of the plant’s area managers.  He did nothing which is just as well because judging from my interactions with him he did nothing well.

After leaving GM in a Stalin-like purge that closed 16 plants and permanently idled nearly 20,000 workers. I went back to college—I was accepted by the University of Michigan-Dearborn (the Harvard of Dearborn according to some) on a clerical error and earned my degree in Adult Education. My first grown up job was in Training (some industrial educators bristle at the term “training” saying “you train dogs, you educate people” to which I reply “you might not mind your sixth grade daughter getting sex education at school but you probably don’t want her getting any sex training.”) but the pay was low and for the next ten year or so I moved around a lot in my career.  I found I had a real knack for Organizational Design (my degree required us to take classes in business, organizational development, communication, education) and spent decades fixing broken companies. Contrary to popular belief, companies typically start out running well and then break, rather they struggle with growing pains; they are top performers for a while and soon find out that the accountant who is great at handling cash flow for a $500K company can’t handle the cash flow of a $10 million company.  I did a lot of succession planning, make-buy analysis (deciding whether it was more economical to train an existing worker or to hire an outsider who already has the requisite skills.)

The company I worked for had a long history of contempt for training; it was seen as a waste of time and resources.  I learned that to survive I needed to: quantify the cost of the problem, quantify the cost of the solution, determine the amount of  the return on investment and length of time when the company would see it.  My job required me to use hard numbers, facts, and the wisdom to take credit when an executive praised an accomplishment and dump the blame on some hapless idiot when things went sideways.

I was trained by both Toyota and BMW in creative problem solving and developed a class in problem solving for our company. I wasn’t a “warm and fuzzy” trainer who fixed things with weasel words and hugs. I wielded facts like a meat cleaver. What you thought meant less than shit, but what you could PROVE….well now, that was gold.

So when the phone rang and my friend and ex-coworker called and asked me to come and work for a company that was going to take a large, global company from being the worst in safety to being the best I laughed and said, no (expletive) way. I told him flat out that I was in the business of change and safety was in the business of handing out Bandaids, kissing boo-boos, and essentially acting blindly with no regard to the scientific method or facts. Eventually he told me that they needed me because they wanted to start a “safety revolution” that would rival the quality revolution of the ‘80s.  I was intrigued and joined the team a short while later. We applied many of the problem solving tools to safety—after all, what is safety but solving problems.  A system flaw either results in damage to the machinery, the product, the workers, or the customer experience.  It seemed like an apt fit.  And I have spent my life since that time trying to convince dullards that one cannot sit and postulate a theory—based only on myopic anecdotal information, apply it universally to all people in all cultures (not corporate cultures ACTUAL societes) and spew out hackneyed books that will be palatable to the the dimwits who plan the professional conferences.  These people effectively determine what most of us will hear, read, and attempt to put into practice.

Years ago, when I was a Global Business Consultant, I referenced my first car (a 1976 Ford Granada) as a Ford POS.  To describe it as such was to insult actual pieces of feces.  He worried loudly and went all the way to his boss’s boss to complain.  On hearing the complaint the man in question who hired me said that he didn’t think the engineers of the infamous crap wagon were still employed—some 40 years later, but furthermore, you can’t be a thought leader by telling people what they want to hear. I would add you can’t learn anything by hearing people tell you what you already know…but what does any of this have to do with God?

So many people in safety believe that causation is always linear, that is to say, an incident is caused by something, which is caused by something, which is caused by something, until the answer is: the operator, customer, or end user screwed up.

I got thinking (at my house this statement almost always is followed by a quote from the movie “Rounders”, “you’re thinking now Grandma? that’s HUGE!”) what if we used this method to the penultimate conclusion? Let’s try it:

Problem Statement: Operator attempted to free a part without locking out

Cause: The machine was jammed

Why #1:  Why was the machine jammed?

Cause: The part was incorrectly loaded into the machine causing it to jam

Why #2: Why was the part incorrectly loaded into the machine?

Cause: The worker was a careless, lazy, oaf who screwed up.

Why #3: Why was the worker a careless, lazy, oaf who screwed up.

Cause: Because nobody is perfect, it is the nature of being human to make mistakes.

Why #4: Why is it human nature to make mistakes?

Cause: God created man in his image but for some inscrutable reason made man a deeply flawed creature.

Why #5: Why did God create something that was doomed to make errors

Cause: Because God has a sick sense of humor.

I know this will rankle some “true believers” and others will roll their eyes because “I’m not doing it right”.  Well tough. The truth is when you use the 5-whys the point isn’t to delve into a singular line of causation, and if we do that pretty soon it’s like having a frustrating argument with a three-year-old who counters every explanation with “why?” until you are ready to scream “just because.”

Why are we so quick to expect perfection from others and so slow to admit that we don’t know the answer? Because admitting that we are wrong is hard, and blaming the failings of others is easy. I used to have a client who was a safety supervisor who would say, “I don’t know” and the conversation would end there.  Everyone knew that he had no intention of doing any sort of further investigation.  What’s worse is we all accepted it.

But think of how absolutely freeing it is to blame things on “an act of God”.  I had a belligerent conference attendee challenge me with, “some injuries are just an act of God” to which I answered, “if God is actually out to kill you I can’t help you, and if he is looking to kill your people…well, there’s not much you can do about it.”  There’s not much you can do about it—take a moment and reflect on that; really let it sink in. If there’s not much you CAN do about it, then there’s also not much that anyone can EXPECT you to do about it. You don’t even have to pretend to work on it—there’s not much you WILL do about it and if you get challenged on it you can always blame God.  It’s God’s will that this injury occurred, and if it is God’s will that this injury occurred then might it not be God’s will that all injuries occur? And who are we to question God’s plan? I’m no theologian but I’m pretty sure that blaming God pisses him off so if you want to blame anyone why not blame Cthulhu? It will confuse management and you won’t have to exercise analytical skills.

p.s. anyone who comments that they will pray for me loses a testicle.

Dear Readers:

I have been writing this blog since 2006 and have been very resistant to accepting advertising revenue for it.  Some of you may think that I’m stupid for doing so, but I just don’t think I can remain impartial on the topics I address if I am receiving  revenue from advertisers that are selling something with which I am philosophically or fundamentally against. 

It gets to be a drag writing post after post week after week especially for no compensation—people tend to see things that they get for free as having no value.  So if you enjoy this blog I hope you will consider buying one or more of my books.  I don’t make much on these books (the perils of being actually published verses self-published) but I gauge my relevance (rightly or wrongly) based on my book sales.  If you have already purchased one or more of my books, thank you.  You have my heartfelt gratitude and what you hopefully see as at least a book that was worth the purchase price.  But even you can help me if you are so inclined by writing a review of my book (even if you hated it) on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Goodreads, or even in a LinkedIn Post.

And no, I won’t hold it against you if you just continue to read the blog and occasionally find the opportunity to think about what I’ve written,

WARNING: What follows may just teach you something but you won’t get any CEUs for it, you’ll just be better educated and informed but seriously who wants or needs that?

Some time ago, I read an article in the Metro Times (a Detroit Weekly) about a Facebook group essentially dedicated to encouraging attacks on women, Democrats, Muslims, and LGBTQ persons. There were hundreds of specific threats of violence. You don’t have to buy my book, but I wish you would. But if you want to help follow this link. Search LinkedIn to find out where these people work and encourage their employers to fire them. This isn’t a political statement, I would react the same way if people were saying that White Heterosexual Christian Men were the targets. Purveyors of hate need to feel real-world consequences. All it takes for evil to triumph is for good to do nothing.

Violent acts begin with violent thoughts that turn into violent posts on social media. How long are you going to continue to throw your hands up and say, “what can I do?” My second book, Lone Gunman: Rewriting the Handbook On Workplace Violence Prevention. answers this question. This is all new material that cannot be found anywhere else. In light of all the talk and panic around gun violence, and the shamefully bad advice some “experts” are giving I hope some of you will read it and pass it along to your executives and HR leads (go ahead, expense it, they will be glad you did.)

Before you dismiss this as yet another shameless plug for my book I want you to ask yourself these questions:

What if anything is my employer doing to reduce its risk of a workplace attack?

Do the people who are doing the hiring at my workplace know the warning signs of a workplace attack?

What can I do to prevent workplace violence?

If you don’t have the answer to any of these questions, use your Amazon gift card to buy the book. It can be purchased in hardcover or paperback at Amazon or Barnes & Noble

I should warn you, this isn’t a book that is pro- or anti-gun ownership rights. The book has extensive sections on spotting an unstable employee (some people’s lives will take a dark and desperate turn long after you have hired them but there are always signs), the types of work environments that tend to trigger these events, and I recently returned from Dublin, Ireland where I spoke on how companies can leverage technology to protect workers from workplace violence. But all the books, and magazines, and speeches in the world won’t change a damned thing if you keep thinking that it can’t (or probably won’t) happen to you or someone you love. You can bet your life that we will see more similar shootings in the weeks or months as people who are currently at the brink of sanity see the news reports and think, “now’s the time”. WAKE UP, PEOPLE!!!! This book is peppered with the sarcasm, self-deprecating humor of the first book, but it also makes use of my extensive knowledge of violence prevention in the workforce (that I gained as head of training and OD for a global manufacturer.) You should buy it.

#attitude, #attitudes-toward-safety, #behavior-based-safety, #phil-la-duke, #root-cause-analysis, #safety, #safety-culture, #worker-safety

Snake Bit: This Time the Snake Oil Salesmen Have Gone Too Far

Photo by Pixabay  from Pexels

By Phil La Duke 

Author: I Know My Shoes Are Untied! Mind Your Own Business. An Iconoclast’s View of Workers’ Safety.
Lone Gunman: Rewriting the Handbook On Workplace Violence Prevention
Blood In My Pockets Is Blood On Your Hands

Contributor: 1% Safer,

For more than two decades I have written this blog and railed against what I see as the greatest threat to worker safety—snake oil salesmen. For those unfamiliar with the term, a snake oil salesman was originally used to describe a fraud who traveled 19th century America selling potions that consisted of ingredients that ranged from the innocuous to the out-and-out lethal.  The seller would claim that the exotic ingredients, for example, snake oil, would cure anything and everything that ails you. The snake oil salesmen were quick-talking swindlers who were long gone before anyone could hold them accountable for the damage they caused. By the time someone got sick, the snake oil salesman was off to the next town with the rubes lining up to be suckered.

I have encountered many a snake oil salesman in the world of Safety, from the ex-coworker who stole the intellectual property of my employer, swapped one word from the offering (even retaining the logo), and sold it as his own, to smug academics who wrote a book or two on how Behavior-Based Safety and blaming the injured was the way to a safer workplace, to the con artists who saw a speech on culture and rebranded themselves as cultural transformation architects.  All made promises that they could not deliver, but hey, caveat emptor!

This week I received the following from a publicist trying to get me to write an article about a new shoe for healthcare workers.  What follows is absolute, cut-and-paste truth, and it is terrifying that anyone—any person, company, or french poodle could ever present this as truth:

I won’t use the names of the person or company to abet the guilty. Please note the capricious boldface is all on her.

To: Phil La Duke

From: Unethical and clueless Public Relations Pukebag

Subject: New type of PPE: footwear protection that was needed even before the pandemic

Date: September 14, 10:02 a.m.

Hi Phil:

Healthcare workers around the US are have been waiting for a footwear solution to protect them from contracting diseases via their feet on the job: this was a danger to them even before the pandemic. The feet are the forgotten, disease entry-point. 

 Contaminated shoes transmit COVID-19 and many other diseases and infections–including HIV, Hepatitis B & C, syphilis, etc.–which result in illnesses and even fatal outcomes, for healthcare workers and their family members. 

Consider this: After over 1 year in a pandemic, there has not been even 1 single provider of protective PPE footwear; but there is now. 

Healthcare workers across the country and locally, and members of the National Association of Nurses and other nursing education foundations, are excited about (BRAND) and are wearing them. 

(BRAND), is new PPE Footwear® that was created by (Name Drop), a former Hollywood luxury shoe designer who immediately pivoted from making A-list celebs shoes, after a family member of his almost died last year, from COVID-19.  

Can I interest you in a conversation with (Founder) and nurses and doctors who are advocating for shoe PPE, about the issue of proper, head to toe COMPLETE healthcare worker protective gear?

When I challenged the efficacy of the claims that these shoes prevented people from contracting COVID-19 and/or syphilis the publicist sent me a follow-up email with a link to a study that essentially said that medical facilities floors were hotbeds of infectious bacteria (not for the record, viruses).  

I worked in healthcare for several years and even wrote a course on infection control, so this is not a subject of which I am completely ignorant, so let’s apply our keen problem-solving skills and dissect this email, shall we?

1. “Healthcare workers around the US are have been waiting for a footwear solution to protect them from contracting diseases via their feet on the job: this was a danger to them even before the pandemic. The feet are the forgotten, disease entry-point.” There have been footwear solutions that protect healthcare workers from contracting syphilis through foot contact for CENTURIES; they’re called shoes and healthcare employees are required to wear them in pretty much any hospital. Furthermore, in clean-room settings (intensive care, operating rooms, etc.)  employees are often required to wear disposable booties over their shoes to further control the spread of infection. 
   This claim took me back to my high school days where I had a class called  Sex and Human Relationships. The faculty always referred to the class as “Relationships” but the students dubbed it “Sex”.  I would deliberately go to my next class late, burst in and say “Sorry I’m late, I was having sex with Sister Judith”.  I did this at LEAST three times a week, and probably more.  I still thought it was funny even after no one else did, but I continued doing it.
   Only a nun can make a class on sex boring, but Sister Judith gave it her earnest best.  One day I was talking about something completely off-topic (I want you to pause a moment and ponder the level of shear unadulterated boredom to which one has to sink to bore a healthy teenage boy with a conversation about sex) when an aggrivated Sister Judith, tired of talking over me, said, “Mr. LaDuke! True or false: you can get venereal disease from a door knob?”  I smiled and slowly leaned back in my chair—I couldn’t believe my dumb luck at having been given the perfect straight line—and said, “well Sister…that depends entirely on what you’re doing with that door knob.” I was sent to the vice principal’s office to tell the simpering weasel in a bad suit and worse toupee my latest transgression.  I started out by saying, “well I was in the middle of having sex with Sister Judith when…” just to make things worse. He stopped me and lectured me about something but his voice sounded like blah, blah, blah.  I didn’t learn much in that class but I did learn that one cannot get a sexually transmitted disease without…well…having some form of sex.  I am not in any position to lecture any of you on your prurient interests or sexual proclivities but let me just say this: if you are going to be touching the bottom of a healthcare worker’s dirty, dirty shoes in, with, or around your bathing suit parts, wear a condom.
2. “Contaminated shoes transmit COVID-19 and many other diseases and infections–including HIV, Hepatitis B & C, syphilis, etc.–which result in illnesses and even fatal outcomes, for healthcare workers and their family members.” This is obviously a scare tactic cooked up to bolster the specious claims.  For someone to contract COVID-19 from walking across a floor would require a person to cough virus laden water droplets and then have the healthcare worker walk through the puddle of mucus immediately remove his or her shoe and snort the bottom of it like a stockbroker snorting coke off an Vegas hooker’s ass. (Now THERE’s an untapped PPE market.) Even in this unlikely (I pray) scenario, the odds would be (according to a virologist who is on an oversight board with me) around 900,000 to 1.  So I am not saying healthcare workers should engage in such practices (hey the odds are better of getting sick this way than the odds are of me winning a multi-state lottery but I still buy a ticket.)
   I am equally incredulous about people catching HIV from foot to floor contact.  The HIV virus is incredibly fragile outside the body and is transmitted through blood to blood contact, or a couple of other body fluids that I really don’t need to mention do I? Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t suddenly found religion or matured in anyway, but let’s just say when I say I am going to put my foot in someone’s ass: a) it’s just a figure of speech b) I most likely wouldn’t be doing it to a sick person, and C) I would definitely be wearing shoes (or more likely books because they would hurt more) when putting a foot in someone’s ass.

I won’t address Hepatitis B and C because I don’t know enough about the diseases to offer an informed opinion on the subject. I will however say that if a single person ever died—or even contracted—HIV, COVID-19, Hepatitis A–Z it would be the lead story of every news outlet in the world; color me sceptical.

3. “Consider this: After over 1 year in a pandemic, there has not been even 1 single provider of protective PPE footwear; but there is now.” Okay, this is technically true but still a big fat lie.  It is true that “there hasn’t been a SINGLE provider of protective footwear” but that’s because there are thousands.  I did a google search and it returned a result of 853,000,000 in 1.04 seconds.
4. “Healthcare workers across the country and locally, and members of the National Association of Nurses and other nursing education foundations, are excited about (BRAND) and are wearing them.” So what? Healthcare workers across the country and locally (um…local to where exactly?) are wearing Nike tee shirts, or baseball caps, or latex catsuits, what exactly does this prove. Also, if there is a “National Association of Nurses”  (there are dozens of organizations that have some combination of those words in them) I couldn’t find it after an exhaustive web search (it’s probably one of those secret societies like the Masons—or the Mansons for that matter,)
5. “(BRAND), is new PPE Footwear® that was created by (Name Drop), a former Hollywood luxury shoe designer who immediately pivoted from making A-list celebs shoes, after a family member of his almost died last year, from COVID-19.” How is footwear a registered trademark? And I don’t buy for a microsecond that so foo-foo luxury shoe designer from Hollywood was so moved because “a family member of his almost died…from COVID-19.” In my opinion, he was far more likely that his business was done and he moved vulture-like into a business niché that would return a fast buck.  And there is NOTHING in the press release that would lead anyone to believe that he knows ANYTHING about making PPE or protective footwear. This is yet another case of someone solving a problem that nobody had.  He didn’t find a need and fill it, rather, he invented a fake need and now is trying to sell his wares under false pretenses. 
6. “Can I interest you in a conversation with (Founder) and nurses and doctors who are advocating for shoe PPE, about the issue of proper, head to toe COMPLETE healthcare worker protective gear? Um…no, well not unless you want me to ream these people out for misleading people and coercing them into buying shoes that don’t really meet the OSHA standards for protective footwear. (no steel/composite toe or other appropriate protection). These shoes are coated with an “antimicrobial” coating. I suspect this is gobblety-gook since a microbe is microorganism too small to be seen with the naked eye and a virus is a submicroscopic organism that only reproduce inside the body of a living organism. Also, take notice that the publicist invites me to talk to nurses and doctors (not virologists) who are advocating for shoe PPE (a nonsense word combination I can’t believe anyone who knows anything about safety would refer to “shoe PPE”. What are we trying to protect shoes from? What’s next, glasses PPE? Hard Hat PPE?

Some people will dismiss me as an alarmist, or a crank, or just a jerk, but I am hard on snake oil salesmen—whether they promise to improve safety by blaming victims or through behavior modification or by magically changing the culture—because the money spent on this garbage could be spent on the basic things that make small incremental differences that eventually yield meaningful results.

If someone tells you that a safety solution is fast and easy, run as fast and as far from that person as you can.  Remember the snake oil salesmen (and women—sorry ladies I don’t mean to insult you by not insulting you) will always tell you (or worse you’re company’s exec) exactly what you want to hear, but when the con comes crashing down it will be you who takes the blame.

I get four or five solicitations a week to plug a product in this blog or in one of my articles on safety.  They offer substantial incentives, usually upwards of $100 for every mention, and up to $1,000 for a link to a website.  I like money. But I resolutely refuse to compromise my integrity for a couple of bucks.

I wrote Blood In My Pockets Is Blood On Your Hands so that people (those working in safety and those who aren’t) could implement a safety system that is about lowering risk and focusing on eliminating the things that hurt people.  In my typical genius, I released my book in the middle of a pandemic so you can probably predict how well the sales went.

So don’t just beware of the snake oil salespeople. Challenge them. Shout them down. Demand proof of their claims and ask for references.  It’s time to drive them out of our industry because at long last, they have gone too far.

Dear Readers:

I have been writing this blog since 2006 and have been very resistant to accepting advertising revenue for it.  Some of you may think that I’m stupid for doing so, but I just don’t think I can remain impartial on the topics I address if I am receiving revenue from advertisers that are selling something with which I am philosophically or fundamentally against. 

It gets to be a drag writing post after post week after week especially for no compensation—people tend to see things that they get for free as having no value.  So if you enjoy this blog I hope you will consider buying one or more of my books.  I don’t make much on these books (the perils of being actually published versus self-published) but I gauge my relevance (rightly or wrongly) based on my book sales.  If you have already purchased one or more of my books, thank you.  You have my heartfelt gratitude and what you hopefully see as at least a book that was worth the purchase price.  But even you can help me if you are so inclined by writing a review of my book (even if you hated it) on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Goodreads, or even in a LinkedIn Post.

And no, I won’t hold it against you if you just continue to read the blog and occasionally find the opportunity to think about what I’ve written,

WARNING: What follows may just teach you something but you won’t get any CEUs for it, you’ll just be better educated and informed but seriously who wants or needs that?

Some time ago, I read an article in the Metro Times (a Detroit Weekly) about a Facebook group essentially dedicated to encouraging attacks on women, Democrats, Muslims, and LGBTQ persons. There were hundreds of specific threats of violence. You don’t have to buy my book, but I wish you would. But if you want to help follow this link. Search LinkedIn to find out where these people work and encourage their employers to fire them. This isn’t a political statement, I would react the same way if people were saying that White Heterosexual Christian Men were the targets. Purveyors of hate need to feel real-world consequences. All it takes for evil to triumph is for good to do nothing.

Violent acts begin with violent thoughts that turn into violent posts on social media. How long are you going to continue to throw your hands up and say, “what can I do?” My second book, Lone Gunman: Rewriting the Handbook On Workplace Violence Prevention. answers this question. This is all new material that cannot be found anywhere else. In light of all the talk and panic around gun violence, and the shamefully bad advice some “experts” are giving I hope some of you will read it and pass it along to your executives and HR leads (go ahead, expense it, they will be glad you did.)

Before you dismiss this as yet another shameless plug for my book I want you to ask yourself these questions:

What if anything is my employer doing to reduce its risk of a workplace attack?

Do the people who are doing the hiring at my workplace know the warning signs of a workplace attack?

What can I do to prevent workplace violence?

If you don’t have the answer to any of these questions, use your Amazon gift card to buy the book. It can be purchased in hardcover or paperback at Amazon or Barnes & Noble

I should warn you, this isn’t a book that is pro- or anti-gun ownership rights. The book has extensive sections on spotting an unstable employee (some people’s lives will take a dark and desperate turn long after you have hired them but there are always signs), the types of work environments that tend to trigger these events, and I recently returned from Dublin, Ireland where I spoke on how companies can leverage technology to protect workers from workplace violence. But all the books, and magazines, and speeches in the world won’t change a damned thing if you keep thinking that it can’t (or probably won’t) happen to you or someone you love. You can bet your life that we will see more similar shootings in the weeks or months as people who are currently at the brink of sanity see the news reports and think, “now’s the time”. WAKE UP, PEOPLE!!!! This book is peppered with the sarcasm, self-deprecating humor of the first book, but it also makes use of my extensive knowledge of violence prevention in the workforce (that I gained as head of training and OD for a global manufacturer.) You should buy it.

#attitudes-toward-safety, #behavior-based-safety, #bullshit, #culture-change, #healthcare, #phil-la-duke, #ppe, #safety, #safety-culture, #snake-oil, #snake-oil-salesmen, #worker-safety

A Working Class Hero Is Something To Be

Photo by Josh Hild from Pexels

By Phil La Duke 

Author: I Know My Shoes Are Untied! Mind Your Own Business. An Iconoclast’s View of Workers’ Safety.
Lone Gunman: Rewriting the Handbook On Workplace Violence Prevention
Blood In My Pockets Is Blood On Your Hands

Contributor: 1% Safer,

The problem isn’t that there are too many people working in safety who want to be heroes. The problem is that too many people working in Safety already think they are already heroes simply because they work in Safety.  This circular logic frustrates me beyond imagining, and has me yet again addressing the topic trying to penetrate the granite wall of these knuckleheads who go about clothed in self-righteous indignation for anyone who dare question his or her status as a hero.  So what does it mean to be a hero in safety? If saving lives is the measure we all fail, that is unless of course you literally brought someone back from the dead—some have, but not that many in worker safety.  Heroism isn’t passive.  We can’t be three steps removed from a lifesaving event and then claim responsibility for it. I have said it more than once (at least I think I have) that safety personnel don’t save lives. This riles some zealots who think that they have saved untold lives because they put together a booklet on swimming pool safety and nobody drowned.  To claim that this entitles the author of some schlocky pamphlet bragging rights for all those people who read said literature and didn’t drown is a specious argument to the extreme. Why not claim to have saved their lives because they weren’t killed by meteorites? (Assuming they read a pamphlet about how to avoid being struck and killed by meteorites.)

Even in situations where it really feels like we might have saved a life chances are we didn’t necessarily.  Take for instance the time I was on a large elevated platform and I interceded when a person who held a notably high position in the organization was absorbed in his phone and walking toward the ledge and potentially a 50’ fall.  I ran up to him and stopped him before he reached the edge and explained the dangers he faced and politely asked him to remain stationary when his mind or body was otherwise occupied. He thanked me and said, “thanks Phil, I know you are only looking out for my safety” to which I responded “screw that. I am looking out for my resumé. If you die I may never work again, and let’s face it, my resumé is spotty as it is.” He laughed and walked away.  A short time later I watched as he walked up to a colleague who was doing what he had done.  He smiled and yelled to me, “See Phil, I’m looking out for your resumé!” I laughed and thanked him.  I saved both lives right? Wrong.  Even though the first man was headed for what appeared to be certain death, there is no way of knowing with certainty that he would have been killed but for my intervention. He could have self corrected. He could have fallen but caught himself on the ledge. He could have fallen and survived having fallen on something that cushioned the impact. As for the second man, I can’t lay claim to having saved his life either.  I did take some pride seeing an immediate change in behavior and a growth in the awareness of the dangers, and even that this awareness changed—in a very small way—the culture and how it viewed safety but I don’t expect anyone to pin a medal on me just yet.  

Now there are Safety blowhards who will argue chain of causality but, they never seem to be around when it comes to chain of accountability. Safety can’t be passive and the problem with attributing passive influence on safety is that it is impossible to prove. So if you want to believe that you are saving lives without knowing the outcome, if you did nothing you are more than just delusional. You are also more annoying than having a mosquito fly up one’s nose.

I have also said that we are never at more risk than when we think we have conquered danger and can relax in the knowledge that we—more hero or demigod than mere mortal—have made the workplace completely and irrefutably safe.  These are two things I don’t see much room for to debate, but alas, no matter what I say some vacuous, vapid, human equivalent of the yellowish fetid discharge oozing from a raccoon’s rectum decides that he or she needs to hop up on the soap box of the self righteousness and tell me how horrible a person I am for not caring more about saving lives. It used to bother me, but after so many years of being called far worse by people I actually respect that I don’t let the incoherent grunting of the mouth breathers get to me (but I sure love to wind them up.) Two weeks or so ago an imbecile took umbrage at the fact that I questioned the juvenile thought process that Safety personnel somehow are endowed with the divine right and responsibility to dictate that employees must behave safely while off the clock. 

The imbecile in question was a South African consultant with a high school education and allegedly military experience as a medic. In her mind, these credentials made her expert in      consulting, environmental requirements, worker health, quality, and social responsibility. She was positively enraged when I countered her smug comment that she has saved hundreds of lives with “if you claim responsibility for people not dying you must accept culpability for the deaths of the people who you didn’t save.” She reacted like a baboon with a late stage brain tumor; spewing vitriol and making wild speculations about the credentials of anyone who disagreed with her simple-minded views.

This got me thinking (anytime I say this, my financé—quoting American History X will chime in with “you’re thinking now Grandma? That’s huge!) about how hubris is probably the greatest threat to worker safety.  The smug, self-congratulating slugs who sit around telling each other what a fine job they are doing. Nowhere is this better evidenced than at National Conferences and Expos where the Safety Sanhedrin (a handful of dullards who have never really worked in safety in a meaningful way) determines the handful of speakers who submit abstracts that support these idiots’ world-view of Safety. We have given these tight ass jerks almost absolute power over the discussion of, and even the distinction of being designated, an emerging topic.

We are not a profession, rather we are a loose confederacy of practitioners with myriad agendas and no real governing body to help us sort through the useful and the dreck. 

We are hucksters taking all the credit and none of the blame. We treat safety like a game of chance betting on red or black. All the while we seem to forget (or ignore) that as we try to distinguish ourselves as thought leaders, people are still dying on the job. 

The brain trust that considers such thing seems to have concluded that 

We want people to trust us but we need management to value our contributions because whether we are successful or not depends almost completely on the perceptions of managers, directors, and executives. We are subjected to absurd Key Performance Indicators like injury rates.  This is as useless a measure of the performance of a safety practitioner as the number of items bought is by a purchasing agent. So what do we get measured on? Realistically fantasy.  Cost? Sure we can fudge the numbers through case management but is that really the intent of safety? Number of injuries? Without having a clear idea exactly the risk level is we can’t honestly say if a given number or injuries are good or bad.

Then we have the “I save lives because I haven’t killed anyone lately” zealots.  They see themselves as social crusaders butting into the lives of workers when they are off the clock. They can identify themselves as heroes, hell they can believe that they are heroes with every molecule in their bodies but they can believe they are endangered sea turtles but that doesn’t MAKE them either heroes or turtles because in the final estimation they are not.

But there ARE heroes in Safety.  I won’t single anyone out but I know plenty of heroes working in safety.  For example, I had a friend call me up and ask me what he should do when he discovered that an extremely dangerous chemical was leaking and exposing workers.  He told the operations manager who did nothing. He told the executives who did nothing.  He asked me if he should blow the whistle.  I told him that I didn’t see much alternative but I added that even though the process was anonymous it wouldn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out who had dropped the proverbial dime on the company and he most assuredly would be fired on some unrelated trumped up grounds.  He went forward risking his livelihood and his ability to financially support his wife and kids but he did it anyway.  The government came in and fined the company and caused the company well-deserved reputational damage.  He put the needs of the workers he was paid to keep safe ahead of his own needs, the needs of his family, and ahead of his pride. He was out of work for a while but still defends what he did and never EVER does he call himself a hero for doing what he was paid to do.

In another case, a Safety Hero works tirelessly on a safety blog, he challenges the gelatin-filled heads of the snake-oil salesmen, he decries stupid theories and answers his detractors with fact-based responses that leave the idiots reeling.  But I honestly think he would kill me if he ever heard me describe him as a hero.

Then there is the woman who worked diligently as a safety manager fighting to implement theories that made sense, lowered risk and generally made the workplace safer. She also volunteered for one of the major professional safety groups.  Before long her pursuit of doing things the right way got her fired from her job and unceremoniously dismissed from her volunteer position.

And finally, the editor of a popular and widely read safety magazine was fired because he ran content that wasn’t the palatable, bland pablum that other magazines ran. He liked to make people think.  He believed that Safety needed to be shaken up and reset every once in a while. He fought to get some of the greatest minds in safety to write columns.

None of these people, not a single one, saved a life but they are true heroes nonetheless.  As for me, I am not a hero. I’m just a guy who likes to piss people off.

”So if you want to be a hero, well,  just follow me.”

—John Lennon, “Working Class Hero”

Dear Readers:

I have been writing this blog since 2006 and have been very resistant to accepting advertising revenue for it.  Some of you may think that I’m stupid for doing so, but I just don’t think I can remain impartial on the topics I address if I am receiving  revenue from advertisers that are selling something with which I am philosophically or fundamentally against. 

It gets to be a drag writing post after post week after week especially for no compensation—people tend to see things that they get for free as having no value.  So if you enjoy this blog I hope you will consider buying one or more of my books.  I don’t make much on these books (the perils of being actually published verses self-published) but I gauge my relevance (rightly or wrongly) based on my book sales.  If you have already purchased one or more of my books, thank you.  You have my heartfelt gratitude and what you hopefully see as at least a book that was worth the purchase price.  But even you can help me if you are so inclined by writing a review of my book (even if you hated it) on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Goodreads, or even in a LinkedIn Post.

And no, I won’t hold it against you if you just continue to read the blog and occasionally find the opportunity to think about what I’ve written,

WARNING: What follows may just teach you something but you won’t get any CEUs for it, you’ll just be better educated and informed but seriously who wants or needs that?

Some time ago, I read an article in the Metro Times (a Detroit Weekly) about a Facebook group essentially dedicated to encouraging attacks on women, Democrats, Muslims, and LGBTQ persons. There were hundreds of specific threats of violence. You don’t have to buy my book, but I wish you would. But if you want to help follow this link. Search LinkedIn to find out where these people work and encourage their employers to fire them. This isn’t a political statement, I would react the same way if people were saying that White Heterosexual Christian Men were the targets. Purveyors of hate need to feel real-world consequences. All it takes for evil to triumph is for good to do nothing.

Violent acts begin with violent thoughts that turn into violent posts on social media. How long are you going to continue to throw your hands up and say, “what can I do?” My second book, Lone Gunman: Rewriting the Handbook On Workplace Violence Prevention. answers this question. This is all new material that cannot be found anywhere else. In light of all the talk and panic around gun violence, and the shamefully bad advice some “experts” are giving I hope some of you will read it and pass it along to your executives and HR leads (go ahead, expense it, they will be glad you did.)

Before you dismiss this as yet another shameless plug for my book I want you to ask yourself these questions:

What if anything is my employer doing to reduce its risk of a workplace attack?

Do the people who are doing the hiring at my workplace know the warning signs of a workplace attack?

What can I do to prevent workplace violence?

If you don’t have the answer to any of these questions, use your Amazon gift card to buy the book. It can be purchased in hardcover or paperback at Amazon or Barnes & Noble

I should warn you, this isn’t a book that is pro- or anti-gun ownership rights. The book has extensive sections on spotting an unstable employee (some people’s lives will take a dark and desperate turn long after you have hired them but there are always signs), the types of work environments that tend to trigger these events, and I recently returned from Dublin, Ireland where I spoke on how companies can leverage technology to protect workers from workplace violence. But all the books, and magazines, and speeches in the world won’t change a damned thing if you keep thinking that it can’t (or probably won’t) happen to you or someone you love. You can bet your life that we will see more similar shootings in the weeks or months as people who are currently at the brink of sanity see the news reports and think, “now’s the time”. WAKE UP, PEOPLE!!!! This book is peppered with the sarcasm, self-deprecating humor of the first book, but it also makes use of my extensive knowledge of violence prevention in the workforce (that I gained as head of training and OD for a global manufacturer.) You should buy it.

#attitude, #attitudes-toward-safety, #behavior-based-safety, #culture-change, #heroes, #phil-la-duke, #safety, #safety-culture, #worker-safety

Stay In Your Lane

Photo by Domen Mirtič Dolenec from Pexels

by Phil La Duke 

Author: I Know My Shoes Are Untied! Mind Your Own Business. An Iconoclast’s View of Workers’ Safety.
Lone Gunman: Rewriting the Handbook On Workplace Violence Prevention
Blood In My Pockets Is Blood On Your Hands

Contributor: 1% Safer,

In the world of Safety, but in other fields I would suppose, we get asked to do a lot that is not even remotely within our wheelhouse of skills.  We cheerfully accept whether to curry favor with our superiors, a desire to keep the peace, out of fear that if we admit that we don’t have the requisite skills to do the job we may find ourselves unceremoniously dismissed from our employment.

Think about it, once upon a time there was a Safety function.  It wasn’t really a department; its budget was set by legal or Human Resources.  It was more of a mascot than any sort of functioning activity.  The first people to staff the function were either injured on the job and had limitations so companies figured that it was logical to have the guy who got hurt talk to other people about how not to get hurt.  In other cases, the buffoons were given jobs in safety as political spoils—by both the Union and management. I remember one less than bright general manager getting his half-witted brother, a failed hairdresser, a job as the plant safety manager. I wouldn’t have taken this boob’s advice on safety if he told me not to run with scissors; he had the credibility of a magic eight ball without the charisma. I had no idea who my Union Safety Rep was, which speaks volumes.

Over the years the Unions championed safety and instituted training programs in safety regulations and compliance for the Safety Reps, and I’ve met a lot of good ones.  But some 40 years after OSHA became law, there still isn’t a universal standard for what specifically qualifies one to be a safety practitioner.

So here is the situation as of today: we have a dismally defined function that is asked to do more with less—fewer resources, fewer skills, less experience, less training, and less knowledge.  Somehow the Safety function became the organizational equivalent of a serial killer’s dumping ground. The engineers don’t (or more likely won’t) do Hazard Risk Analysis? No problem wrap it in a blanket and dump it in the shallow grave that is the Safety office. The accountant is whining about injury paperwork or case management? Dump it on safety.  Before long safety was doing everything from trending injury costs to planning the company picnic.  (You want a truly sick, out-of-control party, let Safety plan it.)

And then one day some genius decided to add “health” to the responsibilities of the already confused and adrift safety workforce.  Just as the Wizard granted the brainless Scarecrow a degree, someone decided that worker safety and worker health were the same things, or at very least required the same skill set.  And the world of Safety embraced it! More work to complain about! More reasons that we aren’t getting our work done.  But the organizational brain trusts didn’t stop there, no, why, the organization reasoned couldn’t Safety be given Environmental Compliance? I mean, they are protecting workers from getting hurt, or sick, why not have them protect the environment, and while we’re at it, let’s lay off some of those lazy Safety staff members because let’s face it, they never look all that busy. 

Then security was put under the Safety banner (not everywhere—no sense in giving those power-drunk safety managers any ACTUAL power.) And now employee wellness is rapidly being added to the Safety functions already overburdened sphere of responsibility.

As organizations, we give a function too much to do and blame them for not getting it done.  We give them responsibility for something they cannot be expected to know how to do and then we call them incompetent.

This is not an excuse to whine.  Too many people working in safety are too afraid or too proud to push back and say, “No, there are people who go to college and get masters degrees in employee wellness” or “I checked my resumé and it turns out I am neither a doctor nor a nurse—I know, I’m as surprised as you are.

Years ago I worked for a coked-out executive who would call me into his office about once a week with some delusional fantasy of a project that he wanted me to do.  I would calmly draw a circle on a piece of paper and say, “this is my plate. On it you will find all the things that you and others have asked me to do”. I would draw lines through the circle and tell him what the portion of the plate represented.  When I finished and the plate was overflowing I would look at him and ask which of these things he wanted me to remove from my plate so that I could accommodate his request. Invariably he would tell me to continue with my current work and he would find some sucker to execute his hair-brained scheme.

Safety practitioners need to stay in their lanes, that is, tell your boss what, given your skill set and workload you can reasonably be expected to complete.  I have become an expert in many things—it comes from hours and hours of researching topics for books and articles—but above all, I am the king shit expert of deflecting work.  I’m not lazy, but I have learned that a secret to success is to stay in my lane and to avoid things that I know with absolute surety that I will screw up, become overwhelmed, or take way too long to finish.

Today people working in safety purport to be experts in behavioral psychologists because they read a book by some BBS self-help cultist who couldn’t help himself at a buffet but was somehow able to convince them the mere act of reading the book they were somehow qualified to implement a largely unproven, theoretical, large-scale safety initiative that will look great on paper—lower reported injuries—but won’t lower the number of incidents that are impossible to conceal. The proponents of these incredibly irresponsible programs are puzzled as to why the number of non-life-threatening injuries is going down but the number of life-changing injuries and fatalities is either static or increasing. Their dubious conclusion? There must be different causes for these types of injuries! They will cling to junk science because they understand it and their bosses like it, plus you can have a safety BINGO! Dullards all of them.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, now we add the unqualified trying to change the cultures of organizations, despite not having a clue that there is no such thing as a “safety culture” rather it is a subculture. They speak to each other at conferences about “swiss cheese models” and “predictive analytics” with only the most superficial understanding of the underlying theory and no concept how to begin to even apply these theories in practice.

The safety field has become a function filled with jackasses of all trades and masters of none. We need to create safety specialists and deconstruct the safety generalist. There is no shame in not knowing everything. Far more educated occupations—doctors, lawyers, teachers, garbage collectors, and panhandlers just to mention a few—have long embraced specialization, so it is the height of hubris that safety folks refuse to do so.

Decades ago if you worked with electricity you were an electrician. Today the duties of an electrician have been splintered off into more than two dozen professions that I can think of off the top of my head.  Instead of becoming the organizational equivalent of stone soup, Safety should take its cue from electricians.  A boiler can only contain so much pressure before it explodes.

Dear Readers:

I have been writing this blog since 2006 and have been very resistant to accepting advertising revenue for it.  Some of you may think that I’m stupid for doing so, but I just don’t think I can remain impartial on the topics I address if I am receiving revenue from advertisers that are selling something with which I am philosophically or fundamentally against. 

It gets to be a drag writing post after post week after week especially for no compensation—people tend to see things that they get for free as having no value.  So if you enjoy this blog I hope you will consider buying one or more of my books.  I don’t make much on these books (the perils of being actually published versus self-published) but I gauge my relevance (rightly or wrongly) based on my book sales.  If you have already purchased one or more of my books, thank you.  You have my heartfelt gratitude and what you hopefully see as at least a book that was worth the purchase price.  But even you can help me if you are so inclined by writing a review of my book (even if you hated it) on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Goodreads, or even in a LinkedIn post and no, I won’t hold it against you if you just continue to read the blog and occasionally find the opportunity to think about what I’ve written,

WARNING: What follows may just teach you something but you won’t get any CEUs for it, you’ll just be better educated and informed but seriously who wants or needs that?

Some time ago, I read an article in the Metro Times (a Detroit Weekly) about a Facebook group essentially dedicated to encouraging attacks on women, Democrats, Muslims, and LGBTQ persons. There were hundreds of specific threats of violence. You don’t have to buy my book, but I wish you would. But if you want to help follow this link. Search LinkedIn to find out where these people work and encourage their employers to fire them. This isn’t a political statement, I would react the same way if people were saying that White Heterosexual Christian Men were the targets. Purveyors of hate need to feel real-world consequences. All it takes for evil to triumph is for good to do nothing.

Violent acts begin with violent thoughts that turn into violent posts on social media. How long are you going to continue to throw your hands up and say, “what can I do?” My second book, Lone Gunman: Rewriting the Handbook On Workplace Violence Prevention. answers this question. This is all new material that cannot be found anywhere else. In light of all the talk and panic around gun violence, and the shamefully bad advice some “experts” are giving I hope some of you will read it and pass it along to your executives and HR leads (go ahead, expense it, they will be glad you did.)

Before you dismiss this as yet another shameless plug for my book I want you to ask yourself these questions:

What if anything is my employer doing to reduce its risk of a workplace attack?

Do the people who are doing the hiring at my workplace know the warning signs of a workplace attack?

What can I do to prevent workplace violence?

If you don’t have the answer to any of these questions, use your Amazon gift card to buy the book. It can be purchased in hardcover or paperback at Amazon or Barnes & Noble

I should warn you, this isn’t a book that is pro- or anti-gun ownership rights. The book has extensive sections on spotting an unstable employee (some people’s lives will take a dark and desperate turn long after you have hired them but there are always signs), the types of work environments that tend to trigger these events, and I recently returned from Dublin, Ireland where I spoke on how companies can leverage technology to protect workers from workplace violence. But all the books, and magazines, and speeches in the world won’t change a damned thing if you keep thinking that it can’t (or probably won’t) happen to you or someone you love. You can bet your life that we will see more similar shootings in the weeks or months as people who are currently at the brink of sanity see the news reports and think, “now’s the time”. WAKE UP, PEOPLE!!!! This book is peppered with the sarcasm, self-deprecating humor of the first book, but it also makes use of my extensive knowledge of violence prevention in the workforce (that I gained as head of training and OD for a global manufacturer.) You should buy it.

#attitude, #attitudes-toward-safety, #behaviour-based-safety, #culture-change, #phil-la-duke, #safety, #safety-culture, #worker-safety

Hey Idiots, You’re Worried About the Wrong Things

By Phil La Duke
Author
I Know My Shoes Are Untied Mind Your Own Business and
Lone Gunman Rewriting the Handbook On Workplace Violence

Yesterday I returned to Detroit, the Paris of the Midwest, from Hollywood, the Paris of Los Angeles.  I had trouble getting a hotel and paid a premium on my airfare, not because of last-minute planning, but because there were four conferences in town and there was a premium placed on hotel rooms and airfare. The conferences were all either canceled or truncated. The coronavirus scared away all the conventioners, and now airlines, hotels, and cruise ships (the worst form of transportation since the Nazi boxcars) are worried that Plague doesn’t ride a white horse, after all, it has a first-class berth on a Carnival Cruise ship.  

The fear of the coronavirus is sheer panic, and it is bringing out the stupid in people (Corona beer reputedly has seen a 28% fall in sales—but hey they got off cheap, does anybody here remember AIDS chocolate weight-reducing candy? 

First, some facts, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that as many as 49 MILLION people will get the flu this season, and 20,000-50,000 people will die in the U.S. from the ordinary, run-of-the-mill influenza. But at this point in history, where social media and dim-witted politicians make up facts as they go, the corona pandemic has captured the imaginations of people worldwide. And why? Because you might get sick? You might have a heart attack and die, or die in traffic, but somehow, dying of a disease that doesn’t spread that easily and probably won’t even make you sick has done what scores of terrorists have failed to do—create a worldwide panic.

I rode to and from LA with a planeload of people many of whom were wearing everything from surgical masks to dust masks.  Maybe it made them feel better, but it offered no protection from the coronavirus. I saw a photo of a signing warning people to:

• Wash your hands frequently.
• Avoid contact with people with flu-like symptoms.
• Avoid unprotected sex with farm animals.
• Don’t touch your face.

I had to wonder, aren’t there ALWAYS a good idea?  I went to the men’s restroom and for the first time in history, the line to use the urinals was shorter than the line to wash your hands. I skipped that line; my dirtiest body part was easily the cleanest thing in that restroom. These people scrubbed their hands raw. I wash my hands more than your average Mafia Don so a big thank you to the brain trust who thought up that tip.

I also avoid people who are noticeably sick, but then I avoid a lot of people for less rational reasons.  As for having unprotected sex with a farm animal, I have yet to partake. I’m not judging those of you who are into that sort of thing but maybe I just haven’t met the right one yet. Even then I wouldn’t think of having sex until we were in a committed and monogamous relation before expressing my love physically; I’m old fashioned that way. I know full well that I will get a torrent of hate mail from the many safety personnel who enjoy a good swine buggering but since when do I shy away from a fight.  On a related side note, I AM an internet ordained minister so if you and that special “comfort” animal of yours want to make it official I can make that happen. As for the last tip, I will touch my face anytime I damned well please. How in the name of all that’s holy am I supposed to shave without touching my face? 

So while people continue to thumb there nose at workplace violence they will run screaming from a sneeze.  This weekend I finished my third book, Blood In My Pockets Is Blood On Your Hands,   but as long as I have the ability to shill my last book, Lone Gunman: Rewriting The Handbook On Workplace Violence Prevention I’m going to keep preaching. I am mystified at how rational people can freak out over this but ignore workplace violence.

Can someone please explain to me why a virus that almost certainly won’t infect you inspires such abject terror while the possibility of a deranged worker killing you, or your wife, or your girlfriend, or you daughter, or that pig you’ve been kanoodling is far more likely to be killed.  You people have got it all wrong workplace violence CAN and at some point actually MAY kill you or someone you love, and the coronavirus statistically will not. But don’t let me stop you from worrying about the absurdly improbably and dismissing workplace violence because “it won’t happen here”.

WARNING: What follows may just teach you something but you won’t get any CEUs for it, you’ll just be better educated and informed but seriously who wants or needs that?

Some time ago, I read an article in the Metro Times (a Detroit Weekly) about a Facebook group essentially dedicated to encouraging attacks on women, Democrats, Muslims, and LGBTQ persons.  There were hundreds of specific threats of violence. You don’t have to buy my book, but I wish you would. But if you want to help follow this link. Search LinkedIn to find out where these people work and encourage their employers to fire them. This isn’t a political statement, I would react the same way if people were saying that White Heterosexual Christian Men were the targets.  Purveyors of hate need to feel real-world consequences. All it takes for evil to triumph is for good to do nothing.

Violent acts begin with violent thoughts that turn into violent posts on social media. How long are you going to continue to throw your hands up and say, “what can I do?” My second book, Lone Gunman: Rewriting the Handbook On Workplace Violence Prevention. answers this question. This is all new material that cannot be found anywhere else. In light of all the talk and panic around gun violence, and the shamefully bad advice some “experts” are giving I hope some of you will read it and pass it along to your executives and HR leads (go ahead, expense it, they will be glad you did.)

Before you dismiss this as yet another shameless plug for my book I want you to ask yourself these questions:

• What if anything is my employer doing to reduce its risk of a workplace attack?

• Do the people who are doing the hiring at my workplace know the warning signs of a workplace attack?

• What can I do to prevent workplace violence?

If you don’t have the answer to any of these questions, use your Amazon gift card to buy the book. It can be purchased in hardcover or paperback at Amazon or Barnes & Noble 

I should warn you, this isn’t a book that is pro- or anti-gun ownership rights. The book has extensive sections on spotting an unstable employee (some people’s lives will take a dark and desperate turn long after you have hired them but there are always signs), the types of work environments that tend to trigger these events, and I recently returned from Dublin, Ireland where I spoke on how companies can leverage technology to protect workers from workplace violence.  But all the books, and magazines, and speeches in the world won’t change a damned thing if you keep thinking that it can’t (or probably won’t) happen to you or someone you love. You can bet your life that we will see more similar shootings in the weeks or months as people who are currently at the brink of sanity see the news reports and think, “now’s the time”. WAKE UP, PEOPLE!!!! This book is peppered with the sarcasm, self-deprecating humor of the first book, but it also makes use of my extensive knowledge of violence prevention in the workforce (that I gained as head of training and OD for a global manufacturer.) You should buy it. Seriously I’m not telling you how to live your life but you should buy it. Okay, I AM telling you how to live your life, just buy the damned book.

Of course, my first book is still for sale, and is ALSO available in the eBook format you might rightly ask yourself, why on God’s green Earth would I read a book that contains previously released material? Simple, like the rain-forest and the polar bears my work is disappearing from the web very quickly.  All but a handful of my works for Facility Management Magazine are gone, and you can basically only go back two years on my blog (eight year’s worth of my work that ranges in quality from magnificent to mindless dreck.) And besides, about a third of the book is newly written material that cannot be found anywhere else. So buy it. People who have read it say that it belongs in everyone who works in safety’s library. It will teach you, entertain you, and make you want to read more it can be ordered here I Know My Shoes Are Untied. Mind Your Own Business or on Barnes & Noble.com.

As always, Read. Learn. Live. Share. Inspire

 

#corona, #coronavirus, #domestic-violence, #panic, #preventing-workplace-violence, #prevention, #safety, #swinefucking, #workplace-violence, #workplace-violence-prevention

CEU-less and Clueless. Certified or Certifiable?

By Phil La Duke,
Reverend, Shaman, Grand-Master Psychic, EIEIO and  Author

I Know My Shoes Are Untied Mind Your Own Business and Lone Gunman Rewriting the Handbook On Workplace Violence

There are people in safety with letters after their names and those who don’t and the two groups seem to hate each other. I get it. For years safety was the place in the organization where you put the people so useless that they could even work in HR.  The reasoning seemed sound at the time: even this dope can’t foul up this job. Then somewhere along the way safety got…complicated. The safety occupation got organized into safety organizations that warred on each other like the Jets and the Sharks—that’s right, like two nerdy gangs that didn’t fight so much as dance around singing—but gangs of oafs none-the-less. I recently severed ties with all Safety Organizations and don’t feel any less informed than when I was active as a member. I’ve eaten the garbage omelettes that are the National Expos. Each year the same omelette and more-less the same garbage with only the most cosmetic changes to ingredients.  So why do people go? Well for starters it’s a boondoggle—the locations are in Orlando, San Diego, Chicago, New Orleans, but you don’t see many in Little Rock, or Oklahoma City, or Parma. 

But if you were to  ask (or read the requests to attend that are  made to the attendees’ bosses) you are likely to see the rationale for attending is simply to retain the precious certifications by getting Continuing Education Units (CEUs).  

The idea of certifying safety professionals grew out of the perceived need to differentiate between safety professionals who were good at their jobs from those who were as useless as the nipples on the tits on a ceramic bull. Ostensibly this is a good idea, and kudos to all those who have earned those letters at the end of their names, I have my own certifications, albeit none conferred by the shadowy body that churned out over 100,000 safety certifications since 1969!

It took me considerable time to find much information about the Board of Certified Safety Professional, a not-for-profit organization that sets the criteria for ten different safety certifications. I don’t particularly have any issue with this or any other certifying body—most of my presentations have been eligible for CEUs. But here again we have a relatively small group of people controlling what safety personnel learn and are able to demonstrate; they define for many what holds value in the world of safety.. The board is composed of a small cadre of safety personnel, some academics and some who hold leadership positions on the largest safety organizations in the U.S. (which strikes me as something as a conflict of interest) and still others who sell safety products or solutions. So what’s the problem? CEUs.. 

Most, if not all, require the people holding these certificates to get more education yearly. This makes sense in some occupations, for example teaching. Teachers have to obtain CEUs to keep their teaching certifications. You may not realize it, but science, history, and other courses can change a lot as new discoveries are made. We don’t want teachers who received their certifications 45 years ago and have not kept up with advances in education.

None of that matters, and I don’t give a hoot about whether someone has letters after his or her name. I have advised several young safety personnel to get certified just to make themselves more marketable, I have advised others not to pursue said certifications because they have distinguished themselves with a storied career full of achievements. 

So what am I wound up about? Safety personnel have gotten so engrossed and obsessed with getting Continuing Education Units that they have completely lost track of the intent, which, at the most superficial glance, is to keep up with advances in the field.

Let’s examine the great advancements in the field of safety? Heinrich’s Half-witted Pyramid? Behavior Based Safety (which is just a rehash of the aforementioned pyramid), I don’t think there has been a truly significant advancement in safety since the introduction of the Hierarchy of Controls.  So what in the ever living name of crap are we expecting safety professionals to learn? Maybe we should re-brand CEUs as Continuing Expense Units. Think about it, it’s accurate—the conferences you go to and pay (or have your employers pay) to attend cost money. This is just another meaningless requirement that forces people to jump through hoops to retain a certification that they have already fulfilled the requirements (arbitrary as they may be) and demonstrated through testing mastery of an arbitrary topic deemed by the few to be important to the many.

So what should be done? If you want a certification (especially those who don’t have a college degree in Industrial Hygiene, Worker Safety, Organizational design or with limited work experience) get one, but if you have a resume rife with accomplishments that demonstrate true application level knowledge of important elements in safety I say, SCREW renewing your certification. Spend your money learning things that are useful to YOU.

Don’t waste your time sitting in a conference room listening to a speaker who is only doing what you are doing (credentialing as its known on the speaker circuit). As much as the certifying bodies and professional organizations desperately want you to believe that you MUST keep that certification, give it up. We need to stop letting a handful of pompous cretins control this whole occupation. People bemoan the lack of professionalism in the field of worker safety well quit bitching and DO SOMETHING end this parasitic relationship between maintaining certifications that don’t mean anything to most people.  If you are struggling with getting a job without one sure get the certification, but otherwise ask yourself why you feel the need to let a group of less than 20 people dictate what you should know and what has value.  We have to throw of the yoke of the Safety Thought Police (trademark pending, get certified today!) and start acting like grown ups.

I am not advocating  that you stop learning, nor am I advocating for you to stop trying to find innovative approaches to safety, but your certification is only as good as the body that conferred it and your CEUs are only as meaningful as the education that your receive—the tools and practical solutions you gain.  I used to work in training I have a number of dubious certifications: I am reverend and shaman in the Universal Love Church of Michigan, Eastern Rite, Trenton Synod, Lake Erie Monarchs chapter, council of 1997 (I had a schism with the Universal Life Church of Modesto California) check out our Facebook page. 

I am legally allowed to perform marriages (except in Florida because I am not a notary), affirmation of love ceremonies for those who cannot or wish to not marry legally (think marriage to a farm animal or a television set), damned people to hell for all eternity, baptize people, hear confessions (I can’t grant absolution but if you want to tell me your sins I will listen) but, and they  were EMPHATIC about this, I cannot perform circumcisions. I made my own certificate. I am also a certified Grand Master Psychic (I know what your thinking, no really). Each of these are printed to look very official and I might add are much more professional looking than the fourth-grade art project that is my State of Michigan Certificate of Training Design & Development (conferred by the University of Michigan; it’s a completely legit AND I don’t have to jump through the CEU hoops to retain it. Apparently U of M decided I was smart enough, or at the very least they were done with me.

For God’s sake people read a book. Speaking of books…

WARNING: What follows may just teach you something but you won’t get any CEUs for it, you’ll just be better educated and informed but seriously who wants or needs that?

Some time ago, I read an article in the Metro Times (a Detroit Weekly) about a Facebook group essentially dedicated to encouraging attacks on women, Democrats, Muslims, and LGBTQ persons.  There were hundreds of specific threats of violence. You don’t have to buy my book, but I wish you would. But if you want to help follow this link. Search LinkedIn to find out where these people work and encourage their employers to fire them. This isn’t a political statement, I would react the same way if people were saying that White Heterosexual Christian Men were the targets.  Purveyors of hate need to feel real-world consequences. All it takes for evil to triumph is for good to do nothing.

Violent acts begin with violent thoughts that turn into violent posts on social media. How long are you going to continue to throw your hands up and say, “what can I do?” My second book, Lone Gunman: Rewriting the Handbook On Workplace Violence Prevention. answers this question. This is all new material that cannot be found anywhere else. In light of all the talk and panic around gun violence, and the shamefully bad advice some “experts” are giving I hope some of you will read it and pass it along to your executives and HR leads (go ahead, expense it, they will be glad you did.)

Before you dismiss this as yet another shameless plug for my book I want you to ask yourself these questions:

• What if anything is my employer doing to reduce its risk of a workplace attack?

• Do the people who are doing the hiring at my workplace know the warning signs of a workplace attack?

• What can I do to prevent workplace violence?

If you don’t have the answer to any of these questions, use your Amazon gift card to buy the book. It can be purchased in hardcover or paperback at Amazon or Barnes & Noble 

I should warn you, this isn’t a book that is pro- or anti-gun ownership rights. The book has extensive sections on spotting an unstable employee (some people’s lives will take a dark and desperate turn long after you have hired them but there are always signs), the types of work environments that tend to trigger these events, and I recently returned from Dublin, Ireland where I spoke on how companies can leverage technology to protect workers from workplace violence.  But all the books, and magazines, and speeches in the world won’t change a damned thing if you keep thinking that it can’t (or probably won’t) happen to you or someone you love. You can bet your life that we will see more similar shootings in the weeks or months as people who are currently at the brink of sanity see the news reports and think, “now’s the time”. WAKE UP, PEOPLE!!!! This book is peppered with the sarcasm, self-deprecating humor of the first book, but it also makes use of my extensive knowledge of violence prevention in the workforce (that I gained as head of training and OD for a global manufacturer.) You should buy it. Seriously I’m not telling you how to live your life but you should buy it. Okay, I AM telling you how to live your life, just buy the damned book.

Of course, my first book is still for sale, and is ALSO available in the eBook format you might rightly ask yourself, why on God’s green Earth would I read a book that contains previously released material? Simple, like the rain-forest and the polar bears my work is disappearing from the web very quickly.  All but a handful of my works for Facility Management Magazine are gone, and you can basically only go back two years on my blog (eight year’s worth of my work that ranges in quality from magnificent to mindless dreck.) And besides, about a third of the book is newly written material that cannot be found anywhere else. So buy it. People who have read it say that it belongs in everyone who works in safety’s library. It will teach you, entertain you, and make you want to read more it can be ordered here I Know My Shoes Are Untied. Mind Your Own Business or on Barnes & Noble.com.

As always, Read. Learn. Live. Share. Inspire

#bbs, #bcsp, #board-of-certified-safety-professionals, #ceu, #continuing-education-units, #dumb-ideas, #dumb-ideas-in-safety, #safety, #safety-certifications

Smells Like A Safety Meeting

By Phil La Duke
Author
I Know My Shoes Are Untied Mind Your Own Business and
Lone Gunman Rewriting the Handbook On Workplace Violence

Dark House Brewery, a microbrewery based in Michigan has a beer that is called “Smells Like A Safety Meeting”.  You might think that this is a compliment to all the hard working men and women in the safety field; if you do you would be dead wrong.  In many workplaces, sneaking off to smoke marijuana is referred to mockingly, as “going to a safety meeting.” Given that a brewery would name a beer after the practice one can logically assume that this euphemism is not uncommon.

Sadly, the fact that people mock safety people isn’t shocking. I get derisively called, “Mr. Safety” by family and friends more often than I would like, and as a good friend of mine offered during a discussion about how a group of us hate strangers talking to us on a plane, “I don’t have that problem. As soon as I sit down I tell the person next to me that I am a safety consultant and that shuts down any further conversation.”  It’s good that we can laugh at ourselves, but too few of us can, and even more of us provide continually fodder for mocking, ridicule, and even out–and–out hostility toward us.

Ostensibly it doesn’t make sense. Why would people mock and ridicule a profession whose sole purpose is to reduce the risk of injuries; in effect, to ensure that whenever possible people won’t get hurt? Unfortunately, in a practical sense we make it easy to see why many people hold us up for ridicule.

“I Save Lives”

In my book, I Know My Shoes Are Untied. Mind Your Own Business, I reprinted a post that I posted on my blog. The post was a fictional letter from all the workers who died on the job to safety professionals. I also wrote a fictional letter from the safety guy to the dead workers in response.  My intention was to post the former the first week and the latter the following week. Well the uproar that ensued from the first post was truly shocking. Safety professionals told me they hated me, some threatened violence, some just lobbed insults. I was so ticked off that I toyed with the idea of not posting the response, but I hate being manipulated so I decided not to change my plans. When my publisher told me that my book was too long, I cut out the response to the letter. I am petty, and this was my pathetic revenge. 

The whole intent of the exercise was to demonstrate to our shared occupation that if we say we save lives we must hold ourselves culpable for the deaths of the people on our watch.  We delight in saying that we save lives but recoil at the slightest hint that we are in anyway responsible for the deaths of workers. We can’t have it both ways.

I take on some of the Myths (or lies if you prefer) that we safety folks tell ourselves and each other and the biggest one has to be that we save lives. I for my part do not save lives.  I provide workers (at all levels) with the information that they need to make informed choices about the risks they take and their safety. In other words, I help people save their OWN lives.  I have skills, and training, and experience on which to draw so that I can have conversations with individuals to help them make their own decisions. I hope what I have to offer, but I also LEARN from these conversations. 

Ridiculous Precautions

Everyone working in safety has their pet peeves when it comes to a hazard.  As I have explained to people who ask about the origins of the title of my above mentioned book safety professionals—particularly those who learned it on the job—there are some pretty dopey things safety professions insist people do.  My favorite is “use the handrail, always maintain three points of contact on a staircase.” Well….as I learned while working in healthcare, having continuous contact with the handrail spreads germs and poses a health threat. The proper way to ascend or descend a staircase is to keep the hand closest to the rail hovering above the rail so that if you trip you can quickly grab the rail and prevent yourself from failing.  Anyone who has seen the (often remarkably gruesome injuries) from people cut from splintered wood or jagged metal on handrails can attest to the fact that in many cases the practice of glomming your hand onto the rail is anything but best practice. I speak from experience. I was once seriously cut on my hand from a handrail, so I’m not prepared to argue the case. There are plenty of trivial, ridiculous things that we require people to do and they KNOW that there is not a good reason for them to do them. Furthermore, there are often arbitrary requirements that we impose out of ignorance (something that LOOKS dangerous but in actuality is less dangerous than the requirement—think wearing cotton gloves around a spindle.  In other cases we make a rule that is more about ease of enforcement than it is about safety. Take for example safety glasses. Too often the rule is everyone must where safety glasses when in this area, but the law doesn’t dictate that requirement, the organization decides that it is too difficult to suss out which employees are doing what activities and who are legally required to wear safety glasses and who are not. We simplify things by saying everyone must wear safety glasses. We justify it as for everyone’s safety but if we are truly being honest it is for OUR convenience. Don’t get me wrong, I support this approach, but we should at least be honest with people and tell them that it’s too tough to get people to wear safety glasses depending on each person’s individual activity situation. Instead we dig in our heels and try to defend the rule. We also don’t do a very good job of explaining why the rule exists sometimes just because we don’t think it’s important and other times because we just flat out don’t know.  But a fundamental tenet of adult education is that you have to provide them the What’s In It For Me (WIIFM) or the learner will tune you out. And what we do, or should be doing, is teaching people to make informed choices about their safety. And this may startle you, but “you won’t get killed or maimed” isn’t enough of a WIIFM for most people. We should we not speed? Because it decreases our reaction time and when some idiot does something stupid you have more time to react. When I tell someone to drive safely I usually add: there are a lot of idiots out there on the road. Taking a moment to explain WHY a rule is in someone’s best interest is your best bet for getting them to comply.

Soft Headed Parenting

Years ago I was working safety on a construction site, and one guy kept announcing my arrival in a mocking tone with “OK everybody the safety guy is here. We better all follow the rules so we don’t get in trouble” or something similarly belittling.  After about three times I approached him when he was alone. “Writing anybody up today?’ he asked through the kind of smug smirk that makes you want to slap him so hard that his mouth ends up so far behind his head that it requires plastic surgery to ever get it back into position.  I told him, “I don’t know what your problem is and I don’t care. But you need to know, I aint your mama, I aint your daddy, I aint your boss, and I aint your friend. In fact, I don’t even like you, not even a little. If you were to die on the job today it wouldn’t affect me in the least. BUT, I won’t have you undermining the advice and notification I am giving the other people who value their lives and safety, so you can knock off your bullshit.” I walked away and, being me, realized that while the guy was a complete waste of skin who was more valuable to society in parts (a cornea transplant here, a kidney transplant there, you get the drill) he was still my customer and while the customer isn’t always right, the customer is always the customer.  So when he approached me the next day and asked to talk to me privately I was more than a little filled with dread. He said, “look, I’ve never had a safety guy talk to me like that, and I want to apologize. I realize what I thought was just joking around was really hostility toward safety. You have a job to do and I think you really want to do it well so I would like to just start over.” We shook hands and from that day on he was a huge safety advocate. Too many people feed into this parent-child dynamic and it gets in the way of our jobs. We come to represent every authority person that people hate and they respond accordingly. Treat people like grown ups even when they act like children and you will soon have a more functional relationship with your contingency.

Pretending We Have Authority and Power We Don’t Have

Safety cops complain that they “catch people in the act” and nobody supports them. That’s because we don’t have the authority or power to fire anyone and we have overplayed our hand. The offending person has called our bluff and we had squat.  What’s worse is many of us think that we have power and authority that we don’t have. The best we can do is be tattle-tales and run to their bosses, who like as not will only tell them not to do it again. These are grown people and they know far better than many safety professionals that there is nothing we can do to them.  Remember screaming, “You’re not the boss of me as a kid?” well that’s what their thinking if not outright saying it.

We Can Do Better

I am hoping that all of you reading this and see some element of yourself in these archetypes that you will do your best to break out of that mode and become something that people won’t make fun of and mock.  We need to be the resource that we always have claimed to be; we need to be coaches and mentors and evangelists for safety, not in an abstract way, but in a practical way. We need to teach people to question what they are doing and why, we need to persuade people to forget about the easiest way to do the job but the safest way to do the job.  It won’t be easy, but if it was than any idiot could do it.

This morning I read an article in the Metro Times (a Detroit Weekly) about a Facebook group essentially dedicated to encouraging attacks on women, Democrats, Muslims, and LGBTQ persons. It made me sad, and then it made me angry. There were hundreds of specific threats of violence. You don’t have to buy my book, but I wish you would. But if you want to help follow this link. Search LinkedIn to find out where these people work and encourage their employers to fire them. This isn’t a political statement, I would react the same way if people were saying that White Heterosexual Christian Men were the targets.  Purveyors of hate need to feel real world consequences. All it takes for evil to triumph is for good to do nothing.

Violent acts begin with violent thoughts that turn into violent posts on social media. How long are you going to continue to throw your hands up and say, “what can I do?” My second book, Lone Gunman: Rewriting the Handbook On Workplace Violence Prevention. answers this question. This is all new material that cannot be found anywhere else. In light of all the talk and panic around gun violence, and the shamefully bad advice some “experts” are giving I hope some of you will read it and pass it along to your executives and HR leads (go ahead, expense it, they will be glad you did.)

Before you dismiss this as yet another shameless plug for my book I want you to ask yourself these questions:

• What if anything is my employer doing to reduce its risk of a workplace attack?

• Do the people who are doing the hiring at my workplace know the warning signs of a workplace attack?

• What can I do to prevent workplace violence?

If you don’t have the answer to any of these questions, use your Amazon gift card to buy the book. It can be purchased in hardcover or paperback at Amazon or Barnes & Noble 

I should warn you, this isn’t a book that is pro- or anti-gun ownership rights. The book has extensive sections on spotting an unstable employee (some people’s lives will take a dark and desperate turn long after you have hired them but there are always signs), the types of work environments that tend to trigger these events, and I recently returned from Dublin, Ireland where I spoke on how companies can leverage technology to protect workers from workplace violence.  But all the books, and magazines, and speeches in the world won’t change a damned thing if you keep thinking that it can’t (or probably won’t) happen to you or someone you love. You can bet your life that we will see more similar shootings in the weeks or months as people who are currently at the brink of sanity see the news reports and think, “now’s the time”. WAKE UP, PEOPLE!!!! This book is peppered with the sarcasm, self-deprecating humor of the first book, but it also makes use of my extensive knowledge of violence prevention in the workforce (that I gained as head of training and OD for a global manufacturer.) You should buy it. Seriously I’m not telling you how to live your life but you should buy it. Okay, I AM telling you how to live your life, just buy the damned book.

Of course, my first book is still for sale, and is ALSO available in the eBook format you might rightly ask yourself, why on God’s green Earth would I read a book that contains previously released material? Simple, like the rain-forest and the polar bears my work is disappearing from the web very quickly.  All but a handful of my works for Facility Management Magazine are gone, and you can basically only go back two years on my blog (eight year’s worth of my work that ranges in quality from magnificent to mindless dreck.) And besides, about a third of the book is newly written material that cannot be found anywhere else. So buy it. People who have read it say that it belongs in everyone who works in safety’s library. It will teach you, entertain you, and make you want to read more it can be ordered here I Know My Shoes Are Untied. Mind Your Own Business or on Barnes & Noble.com.

As always, Read. Learn. Live. Share. Inspire

 

#consulting, #culture, #i-know-my-shoes-are-untied-mind-your-own-business, #lone-gunman-rewriting-the-handbook-on-workplace-violence-prevention, #peace, #repairing-the-reputation-of-safety, #safety, #training, #violence