When are we going to stop doing the same of the same and
start looking outside the box? I remember my first thoughts when I entered the
workforce as a young fellow, there were many procedures rules and regulations,
but not all were easy to remember, follow or even make sense of. When the
procedures were made there was minimal consultation with what should be
included in the SWIMS / Procedures. We are all human and we are all fallible,
we interpret the world differently to one another and many times don’t even
realise it, our personalities, biases, heuristics, social arrangements and
automaticity have a massive impact on how we make sense of risk and how we make
decisions. So if we think that behaviorism programs and systems are going to
prevent fatalities and injuries, we sure have a lot more to learn.
I had an opportunity to experience yet again another
business who thought they needed a “Risk
Specialist” to manage a large number of people and sites across the country and
overseas, it was sounding like they were looking for a “Safety Superhero”. How do
we really think that one person in a company or safety systems are going to
control and manage risk? I asked what about the managers, do they take
responsibility for safety? The response was no that’s the risk specialist job!
Businesses are still expecting one person to be responsible for the whole
company’s risk and across multiple sites without empowering their leaders and
people to take ownership. How do businesses expect their risk management to be
managed if the only ‘Risk Specialist’ is in Darwin and there is a high risk
activity happening in Hobart?
Risk is uncertainty, not numbers and graphs. We can talk
about risk and still not know what the outcomes are going to be until we do the
task and see the results. When are we going to realise that safety management
systems don’t control people’s decisions, it’s actually the people who
interpret and make sense of the systems and the outcomes. To become more
resilient to risk, we need to better understand what makes people tick,
understand their “Y” (personalities) and how social arrangements, and business
culture impacts decision making with managing and working with risk.
Other than the old traditional ways of doing safety, what
methods are you and your business doing to
better understand decision making with risk?
Is your business utilizing collective mindfulness,
sense-making and social psychological fundamentals to empower your people to be
more open, communicative, and voicing their opinion when managing risk?
Is your business overwhelming employees with documents to
the point they are silently adding no value, therefore employees are of the
‘tick and flick’ mentality rather than genuinely identifying and managing risk?
What tools and training is there to help better educate our
staff and ourselves of risk management, rather than the same old tools that are
giving us the same old results? How are we making sense of risk?
Even though it is not fully understood what the causation of
this latest fatality was for Rio Tinto, I think it is vital we start with the
basics of “know yourself and know your team collectively”. Better understanding
people and what makes us tick, will ensure we have better systems that will
actually add value rather than just gain compliance, it will go back to the
basics of knowing the importance of every person’s views matter. Let’s hope our
industries realise that the new trainings available will influence true culture
change before it is too late.
Our sincerest thoughts go out to the family and friends of
the worker who passed.
