Disruptive Safety
Very interesting article and points raised by Kelvin Genn on the Safety Differently Blog
Some Extracts:
Recently I was studying Google’s management philosophy where I was struck by one of their principles: “make mistakes well”. On initial presentation, this would seem to be counter intuitive, yet it is hard to dismiss when examining the success of the Google enterprise. Surely, “making mistakes well”, is an oxymoron?
Google has been a disruptive technology, that has not been constrained by rules. Its technology and business methods have underpinned a complete change of state for the business and advertising models prevailing for the past century. The enterprise’s success has, at its heart, a commitment to its willingness to invest resources in business concepts with no proven deliverable. This practice is a derivative of Google’s “make mistakes well” concept.
The business management literature is clear in that failure to evolve is a path to extinction. There is a wealth of examples, Wang Computers, Kodak, My Space, Ansett, Pan Am, Palm Pilot, and the list goes on. If a business in the new millennium is to sustain success and growth, it must constantly evolve and, by definition, embrace failure as a feature of finding new pathways.
In the practice of safety, we have built a view of success that may be self serving and ultimately destructive to the organisation it serves. Over the past two decades we have defined safety success as Zero Harm, and subsequently interpreted zero harm as the absence of incidents, generally expressed through total recordable incident frequency rate. Is this a true measure of success, or is it simply a convenient way for safety professionals to define success in a self regulated safety bubble where we manage a statistic in isolation from the business it serves?
At the heart of the predominant safety paradigm and Zero Harm, is capital C Compliance. Compliance to rules, behaviours, procedures is rigorously pursued, and those that stray are sought out and punished. We, the safety professionals, need to challenge this paradigm’s assumption of system improvement in a constrained management environment. It is essential that we are partnered in the delivery of sustained success for the organisations that we serve.
Conversely, safety has become constrained by a quality management overlay, driven by prescription and subjugation. I would venture to suggest that his model has led to increasing the probability for catastrophic failure in complex system due to damping down active feedback mechanisms for system divergence. This paradigm constrains incremental and constant improvement. Whilst we may cling to the belief that incident reporting and risk assessment tools have, as their purpose improvement, I would contend that this is not what practice and experience critically examined demonstrate. In any organisation functioning under a prescriptive safety paradigm, the safety management team will regularly note the repetition of the same types incident events transacting through their organisation on an ongoing basis. What we tend to experience in the constrained safety paradigm is reporting avoidance, supported by incentives not to have incidents registered.
The Australian government reviews of productivity indicate that mining and construction productivity is falling well behind the USA in the last 10 years. Safety management proclaims that safety management improves business productivity, roles out the mantra of the iceberg and the cost of incidents, but where is the data that tests our practices, productivity costs of the labour intensive rules driven systems and their delivery on productivity? If safety management underpins productivity we should be seeing the evidence of productivity leadership against the US in peer industries.
As with the medical method for “Off Label” we need to embrace and encourage management and workers to challenge and change the way work is performed, build real trust and “Just Culture” to allow people to share their failures as well as their successes. Hollnagel and Dekkers work challenge us to engage with a success model, rather than a failure driven model. Integrating safety with innovation and organisational resilience is not only a desirable idea, it is fundamental to the relevance of the safety profession in the disruptive business environment. If we are not to be part of making our organisations Safely Extinct, we must abandon methods and measures than constrain and re-engineer our safety paradigm to that of one that enables organisational success where we can make mistakes well.
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