Requiem for Prevention
Latest article by Phil LaDuke on his blog. See it here": http://philladuke.wordpress.com/2013/01/05/requiem-for-prevention-2/
Extracts:
I am a loud (some might say obnoxious) and ardent supporter of prevention. In fact, I one of my core values is “Prevention is the key to sustainable safety.” So given my vocal advocacy of prevention, you might be surprised to learn that I believe that in many cases prevention has gone overboard and that in many cases companies would be better served by doing LESS prevention and more contingent planning. Heresy? Consider the organization that spends tens of thousands of dollars each year preventing accidents that would likely have little or no chance of ever happening. These companies have 20-person safety committees that meet once a week to argue about why an over-burdened maintenance department hasn’t fixed a low-priority hazardous condition.
Prevention costs money and resources that may well be better spent elsewhere in the organization—and not necessarily safety. Equally damning, organizations that continue funding convoluted safety bureaucracies that unnecessarily add heads, complexity, and cost in the name of preventing injuries. Too often these efforts focus on one of the most misunderstood sources of injuries in the workplace today: human behavior. These systems seldom deliver what they promise (that is, a sustainable change in human behavior) and can actually impede important business processes and the delivery of goods or services in the misguided attempt to control human behavior; it can’t be done, so stop trying.
I’m not suggesting that we return to reactive safety practices, far from it. What I am saying is that there is a time and a place for prevention, but its is not a panacea. Simply put, you can’t prevent every accident, and in some cases you should be looking for ways to protect workers when your best efforts to prevent an accident fails INSTEAD of wasting time on prevention.
Variation in Human Behavior
As organizations, we’d all like to think that we hire smart, capable people, and for the most part we do. We spend days (and thousands of dollars) screening candidates: we ask them probing questions to find out how they reason, how they solve problems, and how they think…………..Read more
They Call Them Accidents For A Reason
As much as we would like to assign accountability for injuries, the fact remains that in almost all cases whatever happened to injure the person was unintentional, or at very least, the person who committed the unsafe act didn’t fully comprehend the potential consequences of his or her actions; the accident was an unintended outcome; in short, the injury was an accident…………..Read more
Everyone Makes Mistakes, But No One Should Have To Die Because of A Mistake
I’ve read (I can’t remember where) that the average person makes 5 mistakes an hour. Multiply that by the 2080 hours in the average work year and you have a boat load of mistakes. Some theorize that because biologically speaking change is reckless and dangerous (nature tends to have a “if it aint broke don’t fix it’ approach to survival; if a species is thriving it resists change.…………..Read more
Variation Leads To Errors
Experts in quality, particularly in manufacturing, cannot emphasis the danger of process variation strongly enough; when the process varies things go sour very quickly. Manufacturing and process engineers have made huge strides in reducing mechanical variation, but the variation endemic to human behavior is so pervasive that it’s all but impossible to eliminate it, or substantially reduce it. …………..Read more
Focus On Contingency Not Prevention
Okay, relax. I know that I preach prevention above all things, but when it comes to variation in human behavior you just can’t prevent most of it. If we could there would be no crime, no traffic accidents, and no medical malpractice. And to make things even more complicated, human behavior can be very tricky to predict, and even more difficult to prevent. …………..Read more
Because one rates the severity separately from the probability, one ends up with two scores that must be considered together. Certainly if the probability is high AND the severity is high one would implement both preventive and contingency controls. On the other end of the spectrum, if both the probability and severity were low, one would likely only take action if the countermeasures were cheap and easy to implement. But the scores that are in between (medium probability and low severity, etc.) are subject to a lot more judgment-based decision making. This may seem like a serious weakness to some, but on the contrary, this subjectivity allows an organization to customize it’s countermeasures to its unique environment and situation.
It would be great if we could accurately predict and prevent injuries, but the reality is we can’t. We have to be pragmatic and take important steps to ensure that when someone does have an accident, protections are in place to keep the injury from becoming life altering or fatal.
Do you have any thoughts? Please share them below