Unfortunately when we go out, there is still a tendency in many areas and by many of our leaders to focus on finding things wrong, on finding hazards that the guys and girls doing the work may have missed and more often, of looking for when people are not following the procedures and work instructions and then “correcting their behavior”.
We assume there are people out there taking short cuts, not following procedures. We assume that there are things lurking out there waiting to hurt people. We assume there are people who only appear safe when the boss is around and when we are not, go back to their recalcitrant ways.
This view is based on the premise that our Health and Safety Management system is great. It is complete. It is comprehensive. It covers off on all the major hazards, and tells people how to do all of the tasks. We are so proud of our systems. Why, even our scaffolding procedure is 114 pages long and tells the scaffolder everything he or she needs to know to build an Australians Standards compliant scaffold…
And as our systems are so complete, all we need to worry about is how to make sure that our people follow those procedures and all will be productive and safe.
Were this only true!!!! It is not. It is a load of rubbish.
People do what needs to be done to get the job done, regardless of what some well meaning engineer or safety ‘dude’ has written into a procedure. It is a fact that 99.99% of the time when someone ‘takes a shortcut’ in a procedure, all goes well. This is surely a sign that many things that can go wrong, actually turn out OK.
Things can go wrong in so many many ways. Any slight misapplication of pressure, the way a bolt is handled, a crane is used, a spanner is swung, all can result in an injury. A slip can mean a fatality in many parts of our work place, and yet fatalities and serious injuries are very rare. If Murphy’s law were true and everything that can go wrong, will go wrong, we would see two phenomena in our workplaces: One would be zero production and the other would be many serious and incidental injuries. People out there, actually doing the work, create safety by choosing to do the tasks in ways that make sense to them at the time. We need to remember this.
“Murphy’s law is wrong. Everything that can go wrong usually goes right.”
What we need to do is to recognize this and to work with it. We need to be constantly aware that something can go wrong, even though things usually go right. We may have had a whole month, a whole year when everything has gone right. But this is no guarantee that things will go right today or tomorrow. We need to be resilient in our view. We need to be aware of what to expect, what could go wrong. We need to be prepared for and know what to when it does go wrong and we need to learn when it goes wrong so that we are better prepared next time.
So, in the end, people take short cuts. They create safety as they go along, and just because that is usually OK, it does not mean that we cannot take our eyes off the ball and overall, we must not to be surprised when things do go wrong, Just learn from them.