Couple of great Safety Articles

Couple of great Safety Articles

Just come across a new safety blog “Safety Differently” and I am very impressed by some of their recent articles, here are some extracts, click on the links to their site to read the full article:

Compliance paralysis

Recently, a friend of mine visited a construction site. The site was in the middle of nowhere, in the Australian outback, and my friend was there for a one day boardroom meeting. After the 1 hour site induction in a building near the gate, a group of six visitors left the building with their host. Walking over to the meeting room, the group had to cross a road. The host took out a form and said:

-I don’t see any vehicles approaching. Do you?

The road was blocked by the gate in one direction and empty as far as one could see in the other. After the six members had stated that they did not see any vehicles approaching, the host checked a box. He then went on:

-I think it is safe to cross the road. Do you think it is safe to cross the road?

Again, the six grown-ups nodded. The host checked another box, signed the form and the group crossed the road.

In trying times, we look to authorities to provide us with answers. When things are difficult and messy, people like to have someone showing the way, to have someone or something external guiding us as to what is safe to do.

Read more: Compliance paralysis

Safety as its own worst enemy

Safety is defined in terms that may not support its achievement.

The term implies, ultimately, a condition of ‘perfection’ that defies natural laws and logic. Previously, safety referred to the absence of accidents, and essentially as an unwanted loss for the organization, and a rational construct. At some point the construct became an issue of value and of righteousness and evolved into a moral imperative. Linking rationality and morality in a management model leads inevitably to a goal statement of ‘zero’, progressing to the self-deceiving and self-discrediting one of ‘zero harm’ – not attainable, not aspirational, not inspirational and certainly not manageable.

The ‘condition of perfection’ defies the real world of business or of technology. The flow of processes in business or society is subnormal, and always so. It never gets near a condition of risk-free, and yet the raison d’être of the safety profession is to eliminate risk, failure, variability and error. It then states false goals of compliance, prevention, quantification and defences  Nature, and the organization, drifts towards its intended mission, and randomness is not only ignored by the profession, it is denied. Our profession operates on a number of delusions, which defy logic and the reach of our standard, current management science. The most damaging delusion is the one of simplification, while safety is all but. “Risk is not rocket science, it is far more complex than that” (John Adams). Accident models, whether dominoes or Swiss cheese, perpetuate this delusion.

Read More: Safety as its own worst enemy