Social Psychology of Risk

Heinrich’s Alternate Reality

ByProf. Robert Long

Amongst all the concoctions of Heinrich the most amusing is his denial of reality. You can read Heinrich for yourself here: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/79l4d9q9cpwfmw4r0qrzh/Industrial-Accident-Prevention-H-W-Heinrich-1941.pdf?rlkey=kcc54p8rtsaqsjj2y7du0kykg&e=1&st=p8s26c34&dl=0

There is no science in Heinrich. What is more, Heinrich has left Safety with a legacy it can’t seem to jettison.

So, under the title of β€˜Fact Finding’ in Chapter 4 we have this classic on p.102:

Notice here that Heinrich suggests that β€˜a true accident is not an unforeseen event’ (para 3). Thus, redefining what an accident is. Apparently, humans can know the future and know β€˜in advance’ that they β€˜will fall’ or β€˜be struck by an object’. This is the lunacy of Heinrich!

The notion of being fallible, mortal and human is put to one side by Heinrich to serve the wild imagination of this insurance salesman. An accident is an unforeseen event in all circumstances, that’s what the word means. But, not for Heinrich who supposes that people recklessly want to harm themselves.

Here is Heinrich, with no expertise in psychology or neuroscience, supposing that people can know what will happen and then proceed to do it anyway. Of course, he has no idea that he’s using his own hindsight bias (https://safetyrisk.net/history-and-hindsight-in-safety/) to foresee the future in reverse.

Then on the next page 103 Heinrich suggests we return to his new definition for the idea of an accident, put forward on page 15 of the text along with his famous dominoes.

So, here we see that Heinrich invents a qualitative difference between accidents. He now has

β€˜true accidents’ and β€˜accidents’ making way for his creation of prevention through the removal of dominoes. This is all repeated later by James Reason and is completely false.

There is no linear cause of accidents and there is no differentiation between accidents.

Β This is Heinrich’s alternate reality. For Heinrich we now have β€˜true accidents’ where the future is not known and β€˜accidents’ where workers know the future but injure themselves anyway. No wonder Heinrich repeats over and over the language of β€˜recklessness’.

But this is the alternate reality Heinrich creates in his text along with the fiction of injury rates and myths of cause, all in the name of β€˜science’.

It is astounding that the safety industry continues to put Heinrich in safety texts particularly, his semiotics, to support pure fiction. By anchoring to this fiction and mythology, Safety then looks for cause according to the myth it believes. But, none of this is true or real.

Β We see the same love for linearity in Reason and Dekker.

All this text by Heinrich does, is provide an industry with a delusion of control, where there is none and, sets up the industry for the ideology of Zero (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/zero-the-great-safety-delusion/) from which it doesn’t know how to escape.

When an industry is locked into the silly binary question of how many fatalities one desires, it doesn’t know how to escape. This is the legacy of Heinrich of an alternate reality that suggest if you count all the minor pissy incidental errors and near misses, you will prevent a major injury.

You can see this on p.27 where Heinrich’s pyramid is presented in a chapter he calls β€˜philosophy’ that involves no ethical declaration of a philosophy:

And all of this is anchored in no science, facts or history but the imagination of Heinrich.

You can read further deconstruction of Heinrich’s text here: https://safetyrisk.net/deconstructing-the-myth-of-heinrich/

The real question is, why would Safety want to cling to such myth?

We know why, because it allows the delusion of control. All we have to do now is control those pesky humans who want to hurt themselves (thanks Bradley Curve) and teach them how to remove the wrong dominoes in the sequence. None of this has any resemblance to reality.

We saw in the NZ case study that is now getting rid of a focus on petty risk (https://safetyrisk.net/heinrich-was-wrong-a-nz-case-study/) that ideas of Heinrich should never been taken seriously. All Heinrich has done is create a nightmare for an industry consumed with petty risk.

The Manawanui tragedy (https://safetyrisk.net/framing-and-priming-investigations-the-manawanui-tragedy/) is a classic example of how events unfold in messy and chaotic ways that are not foreseen and shows how deep underlying cultural factors emerge only once the tragedy occurs (https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/hmnzs-manawanui-sinking-commander-yvonne-gray-reflects-on-disaster/I2WMDVSXNFENHE54237D6HLFV4/).

How simplistic and nonsensical to suppose that the removal of a barrier would prevent an accident. What Safety wants is cause that is neat and tidy, that follows some fictitious order, but its NOT real.

If you actually want to know about event causation in a practical and constructive way you could start here: https://cllr.com.au/product/seek-the-social-psychology-of-event-investigations-unit-2-elearning/

The SEEK Program tackles many of the critical issues omitted from most investigations’ programs in safety.

Then you look at programs like ICAM (https://safetyrisk.net/deconstructing-icam-useful-or-useless/) and DMAIC (https://safetyrisk.net/the-delusions-of-dmaic-investigation-method/) they line up to the original delusions put forward by Heinrich. Causality is NOT linear and looking for linear cause only promotes more perception blindness.

Indeed, when you start to explore the reality of causation you quickly realise that Heinrich and his followers would prefer to live in fairyland than the reality of event causation.

 

Prof. Robert Long

Prof. Robert Long

Expert in Social Psychology, Principal & Trainer at Human Dymensions
Prof. Robert Long
PhD., MEd., MOH., BEd., BTh., Dip T., Dip Min., Cert IV TAA, MRMIA Rob is the founder of Human Dymensions and has extensive experience, qualifications and expertise across a range of sectors including government, education, corporate, industry and community sectors over 30 years. Rob has worked at all levels of the education and training sector including serving on various post graduate executive, post graduate supervision, post graduate course design and implementation programs.

Do you have any thoughts? Please share them below