• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Safety Risk .net

Humanising Safety and Embracing Real Risk

  • Home
    • About
      • Privacy Policy
      • Contact
  • FREE RESOURCES
    • FREE SAFETY eBOOKS
    • FREE DOWNLOADS
    • TOP 50
    • FREE RISK ASSESSMENT FORMS
    • Find a Safety Consultant
    • Free Safety Program Documents
    • Psychology Of Safety
    • Safety Ideas That Work
    • HEALTH and SAFETY MANUALS
    • FREE SAFE WORK METHOD STATEMENT RESOURCES
    • Whats New In Safety
    • FUN SAFETY STUFF
    • Health and Safety Training
    • SAFETY COURSES
    • Safety Training Needs Analysis and Matrix
    • Top 20 Safety Books
    • This Toaster Is Hot
    • Free Covid-19 Toolbox Talks
    • Download Page – Please Be Patient With Larger Files…….
    • SAFETY IMAGES, Photos, Unsafe Pictures and Funny Fails
    • How to Calculate TRIFR, LTIFR and Other Health and Safety Indicators
    • Download Safety Moments from Human Resources Secretariat
  • PSYCHOLOGY OF SAFETY & RISK
    • Safety Psychology Terminology
    • Some Basics on Social Psychology & Risk
    • Understanding The Social Psychology of Risk – Prof Karl E. Weick
    • The Psychology of Leadership in Risk
    • Conducting a Psychology and Culture Safety Walk
    • The Psychology of Conversion – 20 Tips to get Started
    • Understanding The Social Psychology of Risk And Safety
    • Psychology and safety
    • The Psychology of Safety
    • Hot Toaster
    • TALKING RISK VIDEOS
    • WHAT IS SAFETY
    • THE HOT TOASTER
    • THE ZERO HARM DEBATE
    • SEMIOTICS
    • LEADERSHIP
  • Covid-19
    • COVID-19 (Coronavirus, Omicron) Health and Safety Slogans and Quotes for the Workplace
    • Covid-19 Returning to Work Inductions, Transitioning, Safety Start Up and Re Entry Plans
    • Covid-19 Work from Home Safety Checklists and Risk Assessments
    • The Hierarchy of Control and Covid-19
    • Why Safety Loves Covid-19
    • Covid-19, Cricket and Lessons in Safety
    • The Covid-19 Lesson
    • Safety has this Covid-19 thing sorted
    • The Heart of Wisdom at Covid Time
    • How’s the Hot Desking Going Covid?
    • The Semiotics of COVID-19 and the Social Amplification of Risk
    • Working From Home Health and Safety Tips – Covid-19
    • Covid-19 and the Hierarchy of Control
  • Dr Rob Long Posts
    • Learning Styles Matter
    • There is no HIERARCHY of Controls
    • Scaffolding, Readiness and ZPD in Learning
    • What Can Safety Learn From Playschool?
    • Presentation Tips for Safety People
    • Dialogue Do’s and Don’ts
    • It’s Only a Symbol
    • Ten Cautions About Safety Checklists
    • Zero is Unethical
    • First Report on Zero Survey
    • There is No Objectivity, Deal With it!
  • Quotes & Slogans
    • Researchers Reveal the Top 10 Most Effective Safety Slogans Of All Time
    • When Slogans Don’t Work
    • 77 OF THE MOST CLASSIC, FAMOUS and INFAMOUS SAFETY QUOTES
    • 500 BEST and WORST WORKPLACE HEALTH and SAFETY SLOGANS 2021
    • 167 CATCHY and FUNNY SAFETY SLOGANS FOR THE WORKPLACE
    • COVID-19 (Coronavirus, Omicron) Health and Safety Slogans and Quotes for the Workplace
    • Safety Acronyms
    • You know Where You Can Stick Your Safety Slogans
    • Sayings, Slogans, Aphorisms and the Discourse of Simple
    • Spanish Safety Slogans – Consignas de seguridad
    • Safety Slogans List
    • Road Safety Slogans
    • How to write your own safety slogans
    • Why Are Safety Slogans Important
    • Safety Slogans Don’t Save Lives
    • 40 Free Safety Slogans For the Workplace
    • Safety Slogans for Work
You are here: Home / Lead and Lag Indicators / Misleading Indicators

Misleading Indicators

June 12, 2019 by Phil LaDuke 11 Comments

Misleading Indicators

trash graphs

By Phil La Duke on HIS BLOG

Nearly every safety professional worth his or her salt has been told that he or she needs to look at both leading and lagging indicators; it’s good advice, in fact, it’s advice I’ve given many times in articles and speeches over the years.  But in my last post (two weeks ago—I spent the last week at a customer site and with the travel travails I just couldn’t bring myself to hammer out a post, deepest apologies to my fans and detractors alike) I questioned the value of tracking (not reporting or investigating, mind you, just tracking) near misses.  Well, as you can imagine the weirdoes, fanatics, and dullards came out in droves to sound off and huff and puff about things I never said (reading comprehension skills are at a disgraceful low these days).  Not everyone one who reads my stuff is a whack-job however, and some of the cooler heads insisted that tracking near misses was important because near miss reporting is a key leading indicator; it’s not…and it is, but like so much of life, it’s complicated.

Near misses in themselves aren’t leading indicators; they are things that almost killed or injured someone, and most importantly, they are events that happened in the past.  Not that anything that happens in the past has to be automatically counted out as a lagging indicator, but unless you still cling to the idea proffered by Heinrich that there is a strict statistical correlation between the number of near misses and fatalities, near misses are no more a leading indicator than your injury rate, lost work days, or first aid cases.  They simply tell you that something almost happened, and nothing more.  Now some of you might try to argue that if you have ENOUGH near misses you are bound to eventually have a fatality, but that does hold up to careful scrutiny.  Leading indicators are often expressions of probability, and like the proverbial coin that is tossed an infinite number of times, the probability of the outcome does not change because of the frequency of the toss.  If you were to toss the coin 400 times and it came up tails, the probability that the 401st toss would come up heads is still 50:50. So knowing that tracking near misses doesn’t really shed any light on what is likely to happen mean we should stop investigating near misses? Certainly not, but we really do need to stop thinking that the data is telling us things that it isn’t.  On the other hand, near miss reporting is indeed a leading indicator; if we accept (as I do) that when people report near misses they: a) are more actively engaged in safety day-to-day (and I suppose someone could argue that this doesn’t necessarily correlate) and b) the more the individual reports near misses the better he or she is at identifying hazards (again, this is a leap of faith, but  I believe in most cases this to be true.) So if you want to gage the robustness of your safety process I suppose the level of participation in near miss reporting is a good indicator.

The whole exercise got me thinking about indicators, and how often safety professionals (and everyone else on God’s green Earth for that matter) tend to be mislead by data because of the erroneous belief that the data is saying things that it isn’t.

Causefusion

Regular readers of my blog will recognize the concept of “causefusion”.  The term was coined by Zachery Shore in his book, Blunder: Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions which he uses to explain how people mistake correlation and cause-and-effect.  According to Shore, causefusion works something like this[1]: People who floss their teeth live longer than people who don’t floss or who floss irregularly therefore flossing your teeth makes you live longer.  It makes sense, right? Yes, except that it is wrong.  There are other possibilities for this correlation, for instance, isn’t it possible that people who are more interested in their health overall might be more likely to floss regularly? In a world where eager safety professionals provide data to Operations people who are hungry for quick fixes, Causefusion happens a lot; and it’s a real danger because it leads us away from the true causes of injuries and may blind us to real shortcomings in our processes.

Another way that we can be lead by indicators is the paradigm effect. When we think of the word “paradigm” we think of the definition, “a typical example” or “viewpoint”, but in the world of science paradigm there is another, lesser known definition, “a worldview underlying the theories and methodology of a particular scientific subject” Joel Barker pointed out how damaging paradigms (in the scientific sense) can be.  Barker believed that there were many instances where the worldview is so powerfully believed that any new evidence that does not support the worldview is ignored. Consider the dangers of ignoring critical new information relative to worker safety because you believe in a particular tool or methodology so strongly that you can’t even consider another viewpoint.

A third way that we mislead ourselves is when we see patterns that aren’t there.  This phenomena is wonderfully described in another book that I really believe is important to the world of safety, Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average by Joseph T. Hallinan. According to Hallinan—and the latest in brain research supports his contention—the human brain tends to see patterns even where there are none.  So in cases where safety professionals desperately seek answers and are under pressure to initiate action, the pressure to see patterns where there are none can be extreme.

Perhaps the most misleading indicator is one of the most common: zero recordables.  Too often safety professionals (and operations, as well, for that matter) see a trend of recordables as evidence that they are at far less risk of injuries and fatalities than they are.  This isn’t to say that they AREN’T at less risk, but there isn’t anything more than a correlation between the two elements; they might be good but they are just as likely to be lucky.


[1] The example is mine and mine alone, don’t get all huffy and bother Shore.

Read more on Phil’s Blog: http://philladuke.wordpress.com/2013/06/10/misleading-indicators/

  • Bio
  • Latest Posts
  • More about Phil
Phil LaDuke

Phil LaDuke

Principle and Partner at ERM
Phil LaDuke

Latest posts by Phil LaDuke (see all)

  • Professional Conferences Are A Sleazy Con - March 29, 2021
  • Hey Idiots, You’re Worried About the Wrong Things - March 7, 2020
  • Misleading Indicators - June 12, 2019
  • Why Do Anything About Injuries When You Can Pretend to Take Action Instead? - December 10, 2018
  • 80% of Safety Practitioners Are Idiots - December 4, 2018
Phil LaDuke
Phil La Duke is a principle and partner in Environmental Resources Management (ERM) a leading global provider of environmental, health, safety, risk, and social consulting services. With over 140 offices in 40 countries and nearly 6,000 top professionals, ERM can help you wherever you find yourself doing business. At ERM we are committed to providing a service that is consistent, professional, and of the highest quality to create value for our clients. Over the past five years we have worked for more than 50% of the Global Fortune 500 delivering innovative solutions for business and selected government clients helping them understand and manage the sustainability challenges that the world is increasingly facing. Phil works primarily in the Performance and Assurance practice at ERM; a speaker, author, consultant, trainer, provocateur…Phil La Duke wears many hats. As an expert in safety, training, organizational development, and culture change, Phil and ERM can help you motivate your workforce, conduct safety performance assessments, help you to build robust training infrastructures, craft interventions to improve how your work place values safety, provide insights to your executive staff, and craft and execute business solutions. If you’re interested in what Phil La Duke and ERM can do for you, or if you would like to inquire about employment opportunites at ERM, contact Phil at phil.laduke@erm.com

Please share our posts

  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)

Related

Filed Under: Lead and Lag Indicators, Phil LaDuke Tagged With: lag indicators, lead indicators, near miss reporting

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Search and Discover More on this Site

Visit Count – Started Jan 2015

  • 24,026,759 Visitors

Never miss a post - Subscribe via Email

Enter your email address and join other discerning risk and safety people who receive notifications of new posts by email

Join 7,426 other subscribers

NEW! Free Download

How we pay for the high cost of running of this site – try it for free on your site

Please take our 2 minute zero survey

Recent Comments

  • Lynn Getzinger on Free Online Safety Training Courses
  • Rob Long on How to Give an Unforgettable Safety Presentation
  • Ndilimeke Shiwayu on How to Give an Unforgettable Safety Presentation
  • Mark Wayne Arboso on 500 BEST and WORST WORKPLACE HEALTH and SAFETY SLOGANS 2021
  • Roel on Free Workplace Health and Safety Downloads
  • Rob Long on Safety Silences – Video Series
  • BRENT R CHARLTON on Safety Silences – Video Series
  • Rob Long on Sleep Dysfunction, Dreaming and Safety
  • Rob Long on Working Out What Makes Sense in Safety
  • simon cassin on Working Out What Makes Sense in Safety

FREE eBOOK DOWNLOADS

Recent Posts

  • Culture Silences in Safety – Holism
  • Culture Silences in Safety The Collective Unconscious
  • Culture Silences in Safety Artefacts
  • Culture Silences in Safety Symbolism
  • Culture Silences in Safety Mythology
  • The Safety Trifecta and Nothing Changes
  • Sleep Dysfunction, Dreaming and Safety
  • Working Out What Makes Sense in Safety
  • How to Tackle Risk You Can’t See
  • Study Reveals an Unexpected Side Effect of Traffic Safety Messages

What is Psychological Safety at Work?

Footer

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address and join other discerning risk and safety people who receive notifications of new posts by email

Join 7,426 other subscribers

AUTHORS

  • Alan Quilley
    • Heinrich–Industrial Accident Prevention
    • The Problem With ZERO Goals and Results
  • Bernard Corden
    • After the goldrush
    • The Internationale
  • Bill Sims
    • Employee Engagement: Chocolate, Vanilla, or Strawberry?
    • Injury Hiding-How do you stop it?
  • Craig Clancy
    • Task Based vs Activity Based Safe Work Method Statements
    • Safety And Tender Submissions
  • Daniel Kirk
    • It’s easy being wise after the event.
    • A Positive Safety Story
  • Dave Whitefield
    • Safety is about…
    • Safety and Compliance
  • Dennis Millard
    • Are You Risk Intelligent?
    • Honey they get me! They get me at work!
  • Drewie
    • Downturn Doin’ Your Head In? Let’s Chat….
    • How was your break?
  • Gabrielle Carlton
    • All Care and No Care!
    • You Are Not Alone!
  • George Robotham
    • How to Give an Unforgettable Safety Presentation
    • How To Write a Safety Report
  • Goran Prvulovic
    • Safety Manager – an Ultimate Scapegoat
    • HSE Performance – Back to Basics
  • James Ellis
    • Psychological Core Stability for Wellbeing in Workers Comp
    • In search of plan B in workers’ recovery
  • James Parkinson
    • To laugh or not to laugh
    • People and Safety
  • John Toomey
    • In it for The Long Haul – Making the most of the FIFO Lifestyle
    • Who is Responsible for This?
  • Karl Cameron
    • Abby Normal Safety
    • The Right Thing
  • Ken Roberts
    • Safety Legislation Is Our Biggest Accident?
    • HSE Trip Down Memory Lane
  • Mark Perrett
    • Psychology of Persuasion: Top 5 influencing skills for getting what you want
  • Mark Taylor
    • Build a Psychologically Safe Workplace by Taking Risks and Analysing Failures
    • Enculturing Safety
  • Max Geyer
    • WHS Legislation is NOT about Safety it’s about Culture
    • Due Diligence Is Not Just Ticking Boxes!
  • Matt Thorne
    • Safety Culture–Hudson’s Model
    • Culture – Edgar Schein
  • Peter Ribbe
    • Is there “Common Sense” in safety?
    • Who wants to be a safety professional?
  • Phil LaDuke
    • Professional Conferences Are A Sleazy Con
    • Hey Idiots, You’re Worried About the Wrong Things
  • Admin
    • Study Reveals an Unexpected Side Effect of Traffic Safety Messages
    • Humanising Leadership in Risk, Shifting the Focus from Objects to Persons
  • Dr Rob Long
    • Culture Silences in Safety – Holism
    • Culture Silences in Safety The Collective Unconscious
  • Rob Sams
    • The Learning (and unlearning) that Revealed my Vocation
    • I’m just not that into safety anymore
  • Barry Spud
    • Things To Consider When Developing And Designing Your Company SWMS
    • Bad Safety Photos
  • Sheri Suckling
    • How Can I Get the Boss to Listen?
  • Simon Cassin
    • Safety values, ideas, behaviours and clothes
  • Safety Nerd
    • The Block isn’t portraying safety as it should be
    • Toolbox Talk Show–PPE
  • Wynand Serfontein
    • Why The Problem With Learning Is Unlearning
    • I DON’T KNOW
  • Zoe Koskinas
    • Why is fallibility so challenging in the workplace?

Most commented on

The Unconscious and the Soap Dispenser

Forecasting Safety

The Banned Objects Index – A New Development in Safety Culture

Dumbs for Safety

The Real Barriers to Safety

Safety as Faith Healing

Who Said We Don’t Need Systems?

How to use signs, symbols and text effectively in communicating about risk

Why Safety Controls Don’t Always Work

Safety Should NOT Be About Safety

FEATURED POSTS

Risk and Safety as a Wicked Problem

Europe – International Workshop Social Psychology of Risk Introduction

The Psychology of Conversion – 20 Tips to get Started

Coronavirus and the Dunny Paper Effect

Who is the Enemy and What War is Safety Fighting?

safety compliance

You Don’t Want a Compliance Culture

The Allure of Submission

Centre for Leadership and Learning in Risk (CLLR)–Study Calendar

Rhythms, Musicophilia and Safety

Models From Social Sensemaking

WHS Research Symposium 2019

iCue Diagnostic, What is Your Risk iCue?

What Can ‘Safety’ Learn From a Rock?

I’m Not Playing Any More

How Workers Really Make Decisions

10 Reasons Why Safety Can Never Make You Happy

There is no ‘Satellite Insightfulness’

The Common Sense Fallacy

Safety Gives Me the Right over Other Rights

The Bias of Method Design in Risk

More Posts from this Category

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address and join other discerning risk and safety people who receive notifications of new posts by email

Join 7,426 other subscribers

How we pay for the high cost of running of this site – try it for free on your site

 

How To Make Your Own Hand Sanitizer

 

 

How to Make your own Covid-19 Face Mask

 

Covid-19 Returning To Work Safety, Transitioning, Start Up And Re Entry Plans

 

How’s the Hot Desking Going Covid?

imageOne of the benefits of the Covid-19 epidemic is a total rethink about how we live and work (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-28/coronavirus-could-reshape-how-australians-work-forever/12097124 ).

Expertise by Regurgitation and Re-Badging

One of the fascinating things about the Coronavirus pandemic is watching Safety morph into epidemiology expertise. I would like a dollar for every flyer, presentation, podcast, powerpoint, checklist template, toolbox talk and poster set that had jumped into my inbox… Read the rest

The Stress of Stasis

One of the challenging things about the Coronavirus crisis is stasis. For those without work and confined to home, for those in self-isolation, it’s like life is frozen in time. ‘Stay at home’ is the mantra. The trouble is, in… Read the rest

loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.