As stated in our CERM article 127, highly effective safety initiatives are not a short list of “Do’s” and “Don’ts” but include a complex mix of integrated and interacting best safety practices as shown in Figure 1. In this article, we will focus on one of the 7 critical ingredients of an effective Cascading Safety Management System: The Elimination of Biased Thinking and Mental Blocks highlighted with the arrow in Figure 1.
Most people are optimistic and they grow up with feelings of infallibility and even immortality. When they go to their place of work each day, the last thing they think of is that they could be seriously injured or killed there. However, according to OSHA, nearly 3.0 million private industry injury and illness cases were reported in 2014 in the USA and 4,679 workers died on the job due to an injury. OSHA considers 2014 as a good year compared to previous years, even though, on average, almost 57,000 job related injury or illness cases were reported each week and 90 workers died each week of 2014. No matter how anyone “spins” the improvement story and graphs, this is still alarming battlefield statistics that need to be taken seriously.
Risky Biases and Blind Spot
Safety initiatives must work harder to reduce the biases, blind spots, narrow paradigms and mental blocks that reinforce each other to hinder true progress for safety efforts. We need safety systems that protect us from ourselves, our narrow perspectives and from optimistic leaders who also come to work each day not expecting that the decisions they made, the culture they condone and the processes they are proud of can injure or kill their workers.
A major cause of these negative safety statistics is that we are unable to identify the long string of biases and mental blocks that reinforce each other to create safety risks. This problem starts with a string of smaller differences in perspectives (Figures 2 and 3) that creates multiple perceptions of safety reality for different groups of stakeholders.
Mental Illusions and Narrow Paradigms Warp our Definitions of Reality
Leaders and employees enter the work space each day and hope to be protected from the slow but steady build up of cascading risks over time. Figure 4 illustrates the all too common worst case scenario of how cascading and silently reinforcing mental blocks and narrow paradigms can link, roll downhill and create unsafe work environments. This then becomes a perfect storm when the required uphill learning feedback loops are not accepted by leadership which stifles organization learning on safety near-misses, employee concerns and other recorded safety issues.
Triangulated Solicitation of Different Perspectives
Risky Biases and narrow paradigms can be exposed with open, candid and anonymous solicitation of different perspectives and an honest attempt to construct one world view of the business from multiple different but valid perspectives. Perspectives should not be viewed as right or wrong but rather as valid from each vantage point of all stakeholder group in the system. Leaders, mid-management and non-management must openly share their uncomfortably different perceptions of reality and agree on one consolidated view of their world. This is required to lay a solid foundation for a successful hybrid safety initiative.
Stay tuned for our next article on Cascading Safety Management.
Bio: David Patrishkoff is President of E3 – Extreme Enterprise Efficiency® and the Founder of The Institute for Cascade Effect Research®. He is a Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt, Adjunct Professor for Kettering University Master’s Degree Programs and the inventor of a Cascading Risk Management Methodology. Prior to starting his consultancy in 2001, David held many worldwide senior executive positions in the automotive and trucking industry. Author email: david.patrishkoff@cascadeeffects.com.
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