People and Safety

When we look at people as people and not as a number, we will start to see them as people that are doing the same, thing we are doing. Supporting a family and making a living.

Since we are all human, we should never focus on zero. (David Collins from www.safetyrisk.net  once said: “I believe nothing is impossible”.) Saying we will achieve Zero harm is saying that we are all perfect. I can assure you we are not all perfect as I know without a doubt, I am fallible and can never realistically achieve zero.

If we set realistic goals, then there is a chance we can reach a statistical target that someone behind a desk dreamed up to get a few kudos as if they did something fantastic. When looking at statistics and the numbers game we set our self-up for failure. We should never keep a running number of statistical figures for safety incidents. We should take what we learned from an incident and move forward. If we keep re-visiting it then we are living in the past. The past is behind us and we need to move towards the future. Let us strive for progress and not perfection. We are all subject to make an error in judgement and most of us have. We did not let that error define us as a person we learned from it and moved into the future.

As a child most can relate to our parents telling us do not touch that oven door it is hot. We stand there and looked puzzled as we understand do not touch but we do not understand what hot is. Now how do we find out what hot is because we are curious and want to know so we take a risk and reach out and touch it. We feel a pain and we associate it to the word hot. From that day forward when someone says it is hot, we now know what hot means. The point here is with out risk we will not learn.

A positive word of encouragement can help change anyone’s destiny. So, let us stop the focus on negative statistics and practice at being more positive and change someone’s destiny. Maybe our own.