Safety - time for a new direction (Laing O’Rourke)

This was posted (the link below) on linkedin before it was taken off, as I suppose I must of made some comments that seen through the BS, especially by Dr Long who in my view will agree with anyone who may help get noticed. And poor old John got sucked right into his BS...oh no ROB... that is, "we are moving away from measuring failure"!! Lets see the evidence of that Mr Green! I can come a spend a week and any of your locations to test this.

http://www.laingorourke.com/engineering-the-future/eej-2016/safety-time-for-a-new-direction.aspx

Here is the transcript comments (my comments in blue... the colour of people faces when I challenge their views)

LONG - Great story and congrats except that incident rates are not a measure of safety

JOHN GREEN - Rob, indeed they are not and that's we are moving away from measuring failure

LONG - Great work John, i admire all you and Laing ORourke are doing

SAFETY CYNIC (ME) - Rob...Incident rates are and can be a measure of safety. And when you talk of what safety needs and must do (as you always advertise), then lacking any of these 'things' can account for a increase in injuries (incidents)...so when we see an increase in a particular area of failure (hand injuries), this measure shows safety is in need of attention, we can then implement changes. I have also seen you measure perceptions in safety, why would you conduct a pissy IQ survey full of leading questions...what is the measure/score for?

And funny enough...the article continually uses a measure of incident rates to say how well its improved. And with Dekker talking about zero harm...keep in mind my views on the other end of scale...that promoting excellence, maturity and worldclass... can and do and encourage the suppression, discouragement or recategorisation of incident or injury data and lead to other ‘numbers games’. Last thing a tier one wants is to loose its measure of safety (that's a valuable reputation to loose!!) so we see the good old return to work RTW) programs reduce the measure...for safety sake! 

And also, I must be highly critical about how safety improves with some new age solution...could it be just the fact that the extra interest in safety has improved safety! Say the old system has been in place for 5 years...there is no excitement, no interest, incidents 'measure' has gone up!!! as it just there in a background...then suddenly, a new CEO comes on board and revisits all the same old stuff...but actually does things like replace old equipment, put some workers though training and purchase everyone some new safety gear...WOW...the reintroduction of the old stuff has really improved safety!!!

And these people are supposed to be safety experts...i just work on a farm every now an again!!!

I have not finished with this post...let's see what happens when they have an incident!!!

Carsten Busch...Safety Myth 101: Musings on Myths, Misunderstandings and More

My master took this photo of me,  

Holding the book that came via hot mail, directly  

What would you want with a book? the master asked...  

I said to learn more about safety myths and risk nonsense craft   

I must learn the human ways  

So I can make my own program, to trick and harm all days  

But, If what the author writes is good  

I'll play his soul, risk likelihood...   

- lets begin to read..hahahaha

hypercompliance

MY reply

I read the topic today - Have very mixed feelings and kind of walked away going...well?. The main thing that got to me was that it is saying 'hypercompliance' goes above compliance (sounds like going lower than Zero).

You cannot go above compliance!

Secondly, if going above compliance is a bad thing, then think of all this new age safety where some safety experts (who i assume have never actually been in safety as a internal role) are saying we need to include such topics as psychology - Just think for a second the "hypercompletixity" (my word so don't steal it!!) that this brings into the the argument...more on this onday!

So, like hypercompliance, hypercompletixity is making things worse...

food for brain algorithms....

Out with old and in with new...that makes money!

I find it interesting in looking at safety experts who write about how they have been in safety for many, many years and they say in that time they have created a great, excellent, almost perfect safety cultures and have reduced incident/Lti rates down to almost nil, yet now they are saying that all the old orthodox safety practices should be avoided as they fail in so many ways.They say how they did not know much back then, but hang!!! didn't they just say how excellent they were in the past! Oh, but maybe they didn't mean that! Its all about selling what is in!

Alan on ZERO...yeah, zero hero

Alan Quilley is asking for safety professionals to give some feedback on how the zero harm topic failed as a measurement!!! Then he says we must ditch the zero measure to focus on what he says are "real measurement of the existence of safety production"...what, are we to measure the success or failure of training etc !!! Zero harm is not a measure...and any 'real measurement' is all based around the zero harm goal...risk management is all about zero harm...all safety is about zero harm. Shame Alan thinks he is to excellent to face some hard question

Its a shame these so called safety experts don't believe in zero harm as a goal (the only see it as number (naive), then rant and rave how zero is not possible---yet advertise that using their excellent safety systems can control ALL risk).. I wonder if a sports team has the goal of winning? (its the same thing!). Zero is about doing what we can in every area of safety to eliminate risk...(but you would have to understand about risk to understand my point there). I.e. if we can eliminate 'a' risk (singular - that it seems no-one gets), then we eliminate the harm (zero harm)...if we swim with sharks in a shark proof cage..then we have got zero harm...where did the shark cage come from...from zero harm philosophy... Some of my points on ZERO HARM logic. 1) If you don't believe in zero harm, you cannot believe in elimination of risk (as used in Hierarchy of controls) 2) Zero Harm is a goal, it's not a destination but an activity 3) People say it is impossible to have zero harm as a complete, then they must also not be able to believe in love, trust and goodness and none of these exits either in a complete. 4) Zero harm occurs often when work is done without harm. 5) All safety in some way is really about no harm!