Don’t Jump To Safety Management Solution

Latest article by Guest Author, renowned Safety Writer, Alan D. Quilley CRSP.  Alan is the author of “The Emperor Has No Hard Hat – Achieving REAL Safety Results”  and “Creating & Maintaining a Practical Based Safety Culture”. Read all of his articles HERE

He’s the president of Safety Results Ltd., a Sherwood Park, Alberta, OHS consulting company. You can see more of his work through his Safety Blog – http://safetyresults.wordpress.com .

Don’t Jump To “Safety Management” Solution

If you are like me, there are times when you take the time to reflect on why you believe what you do. I’m often scanning the horizon for innovative ideas and reflecting on the historic maturation and changes in my beliefs. There have been significant events that have resulted in my changing my fundamental beliefs in the style and content of the safety management process I use to consult with. The first such event was my reading of the NSC Accident Prevention Manual and their initial approaches which were based on Heinrich’s theories (link to Article). The next significant text that influenced me was Frank Bird Jr.’s Total Loss Control. Reading William W. Lowrance’s “Of Acceptable Risk” caused profound changes in my thinking about what safety was and how to accomplish it. Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and Dan Petersen’s Safety By Objectives…both had a tremendous effect on my thinking and caused me to shift my beliefs about how safety management systems work and how they could be successful. Of course W. Edwards Deming’s body of work probably affected us all.

I have come to believe certain classic management models have enduring features that make them as true today as they were when they were originally published. Some I believe missed the mark and have not stood the test of time as being valid. Taylor, Maslow, McGregor, Skinner, Drucker, Petersen, Deming all have had enduring theories and management systems observations that have, in my humble opinion, stood the test of time. It is important if we are to use these theories and approaches that we constantly test and continue to test if these approaches still provide us wisdom or are falling by the wayside.. That being said, taking the time not to just read the current New York Times Top Ten Business Books list from this morning’s edition but to search back to see what helped shape the current CEO’s and leader’s thinking is important to the Safety consultant of today.

One such influential author and consultant is William B. Rouse. His book “Don’t Jump to Solutions: Thirteen Delusions That Undermine Strategic Thinking” I believe has enduring lessons to be learned in our striving to managed safety in our places of work and at home. Although not specifically a “safety management” book, I believe “Don’t Jump to Solutions” can and does fit to enhance our safety management efforts. Let’s take a look at the 13 points made in this classic text and how the teachings can be applied to safety management. I’ve taken some liberties with Rouse’s list to enhance how I believe his observations and advice can apply to safety management:

1. Visions need to be dynamic – not unyielding to the current realities

“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds can not change anything.” – George Bernard Shaw

Vision and intention are important and so is taking the pathways that are determined with knowledge. Safety Polices and commitments are important to establish our vision and intention for how we are going to operate our companies. These need to be fluid and valid in our current operating environments. For example, using the same audit multiple years in a row…can be (who are we kidding… it IS) counterproductive. We need to raise the bar as we mature our safety culture.

2. Admit and understand your weaknesses. Stop lying to yourself

Driving performance and action plans through falsified data through re-classifying injury data is silly. Pretending we have better results than we do is misleading the very people who need to know the truth. Lying to yourself will come back to hurt you!

3. Learn to be humble and realistic. Don’t attribute all success to great management and blame all failures on bad luck.

Preventing injuries rather than creating safety culture is causing false positives and false confidence. Measure what you do to create safety rather than what didn’t happen in the way of injuries and costs gives a company a false sense of accomplishment. Not having an injury for a period of time can be the result of just luck.

4. Change is inevitable – Effective Change is an art.

Managing the change process is essential yet is so often poorly executed. Being overly optimistic as to the difficult steps a corporation needs to take to make a change in anything significant takes time and skill, planning and diligence.

5. Don’t become myopic. View your Safety Management System from various viewpoints. Passing the same audit annually is NOT striving for safety excellence. It’s striving for Safety mediocrity. As you move through the natural evolution of the Safety Management Continuum it will be necessary to change your viewpoint and process. The old adage “What got you here, won’t get you there” is very true in Safety Management. As you mature your culture, you need to let go of the past activities to success.

6. Avoid the one big win. “Zero injuries” for a period of time is a great result only when you truly understand why it occurred.

If you can’t explain what you are doing to get your results…you don’t know what you are doing. Achieving Zero Injuries by manipulating data and classifications is lying to yourself. Celebrating low injuries rates that could just be a matter of luck is foolish. Work diligently to understand how your safety creating activities are giving you the true results you are getting in safety management.

7. Forced agreement through forced consensus glosses over underlying conflicts.

Consensus based rules, regulations and international standards are often created through large groups of people reaching agreement which is often diluted down to meaningless and ineffective process. The very process of achieving consensus can force the end result into a diluted non-effective misunderstanding of what creates success.

8. Short term gains in hitting the numbers will negatively affect the long term success

Your current injury rate alone probably tells you nothing about what is working and what isn’t. It certainly tells you nothing about what could happen in the future. Managing activities that create safety and measuring those activities against the results achieve will become a tool to predict what will happen if a corporation continues to do the activities that prove successful.

9. Understanding the importance of relationships is extremely important to success.

Individual and group Needs, Wants, Aspirations and Fears need to be addressed for success.

Conflict management and Getting to Yes are two very misunderstood techniques in modern safety management. Why, I don’t know. Can we fix it…of course we can!

Safety Management is a people business and in some cases has be reduced to ineffective audits and inspections of paper and hardware. As Dan Petersen said…”Paper doesn’t save people…People save people.

10. Don’t get locked into process. Organizational change is necessary as your safety culture matures.

What got you here won’t get you there. Evolution of your safety culture is essential to improvement. Each stage of the Safety Management Continuum requires different levels of activity. Once you’ve fulfilled the engineering/procedural level…it does little good to stay there.

11. Focusing on the past is a mistake.

Drive the Safety Management System by looking forward. The past is seldom a predictor of the future unless you have detailed statistical evidence to support your beliefs in repeated history. Future plans and the activities to execute those plans are much more important than audits and incident rates. Measure what you do, not what happened to you, as an indicator of future success.

12. Manage change…once you’ve moved forward don’t allow the organization to fall back into old processes and behaviours.

True change is measured by forward movement. Unless the behaviours related to change are measured and supported through consequences, nothing truly happens.

13. Good plans can only place you on the road to serendipity. Even good plans are affected by the unplanned.

Whatever your plan is, whatever your change activities are, you’ll need to be flexible about taking detours that make sense along the way. Don’t lock into failure by not recognizing the potholes in the road to success that require a route change.

I highly recommend that you read “Don’t Jump to Solutions: Thirteen Delusions That Undermine Strategic Thinking” – William B. Rouse. There are insights to what we can all do to be much more effective.