Business risk

                    BUSINESS RISK

So far, this year (2017) there has been approximately 30 plus industrial fatalities recorded in Australian workplaces. We have all the legislation, policies, document controls in place, and these aren’t enough, workers are still dying. Isn’t it time to stop and consider learning new methods for risk in our workplaces? The time for our safety to think and act differently is now. The current talk around risk is elimination, control, measuring behaviours etc. But do we really know what the risk outcomes are going to be before the person/s act them out? Identifying Hazards doesn’t seem too hard, but are we really knowing risk before it takes place with the hazards? Assumption and perceptions, how accurate are they? Have we been misleading ourselves slightly on risk management? Should it be risk management or should it be risk learning?

  

I know of no case study in history that describes an organisation that has managed itself out of a crisis. Every single one of them was led. Yet a good number of our educational institutions and training programs for safety today are focused on training effective Safety compliance managers, rather than training great safety leaders to lead, coach and mentor, to be effective communicators and consultants. Same goes for supervisors, and management roles, we must lead our way to better education around risk.

 What can we do differently? Our systems, our programs, our rules, our regulations, they are all doing their bit to help manage risk, however it is not enough. I remember going into a business for the first time as their safety person, and seeing workers comp premiums going through the roof, ‘our longest period without a medical treatment injury (MTI) was 14 days’, yet the business had rigorous safety management systems, had a behavioural based safety program, with no luck to stop the spiralling trends, safety seemed to be a costly pain to the business. I just knew to improve the injury rates, I had to do something different, “I can’t manage risk for another person”, not unless I get into their heads and understand how they perceive working with the hazards, and even then, we would not know the true outcome of risk until they acted out the task. I knew the conversation was a critical part of what was needed, just like the old Behavioural Based Safety Observation, but there had to be more as that was not going to help the risk outcomes either.   

I think it is fair to say nearly all Australian business owners do not want to hurt anyone, nor do our policy makers, nor our safety people so rather than fighting between ourselves it is time to work together. “Most of us hate the feeling that comes when someone gets hurt at work”, and yes, we have procedures, policies and many tools to help prevent these dreaded days, yet they still come, ‘2017 work related fatality statistics is a clear indication of this’. When I reflect, and think of risk in safety, it draws me back to this, ‘humans are fallible, decision making creates risk and many influential undercurrents creates unnoticeable changes to our thinking and judgements of risk’. People do not go out of their way to get injured and sense making isn’t common. Our working worlds are now faster worlds than they ever have been before, more time pressures, less time and money for learning, and our education for risk hasn’t changed a great deal over the years, yet possibly becoming more digitalised (automated) and less personal, hence the reasons we are seeing more injuries.

When discussing risk with many organisations, they are seen to be only managing the Primary Risks (physical risks, objects etc.), many have blanket policies in place (gloves to be worn at all times, no fixed blade knives to be used, etc.) The secondary & tertiary layers of risk are not identified or managed well, to a degree that will mitigate risk. Most don’t even know what these layers of risks are. Risks like overconfidence, risk homeostasis, change blindness, individual biases, time pressure, rationality flooding, social arrangements, desensitisation to risks, company language / culture, what affects semiotics (signs and symbols) may have on people, etc. There are so many risks like the ones just mentioned, that go unnoticed and these are the types of risk we need to have conversations about, to see if we can identify them.

It’s time to progress our industries and learn what these risks are, and what the risk indicators might look, sound and or feel like. It is time to learn real effective communication consultation dialog like high reliability organisations use. No organisation wants to have a ‘NASSA Challenger or Deep Water Horizon’ event or any fatality for that matter. It is time to realise that legislation and compliance alone is not the silver bullet. Remember when we were kids, how did we learn to cross the road, stranger danger, swimming climbing a tree, etc. We learnt by sharing our experiences, and talking to one another about the risks.

Our communication and consultation discourse can create risk if we are unaware of how, “humans are fallible, and many things influence our thoughts and decisions like conversations and interpretation.” It is not just what is said that we need to take note of, it is what is not said that is just as important when managing risk. Language and how it is spoken (tone), can create many hidden risks to individuals and groups in the workplace. Conversations are a good way of validating a persons or groups attempt to manage risk, are we having enough conversations and are they in the right context?

“We do all of our work in consideration

of Murphy’s Law.”

Remember the days of our old tradies, who mentored and guided our apprentices, and labourers when they first started, there was good experiential education and shared knowledge, which helped prevent injuries to those new comers, by way of learning about risk not avoiding it. You would always see our experienced workers crosschecking the young one’s work and activities to make sure they didn’t miss anything as they knew we humans are fallible. Yet they would allow us to play with the risk to help us learn and develop respect for the risk. Now it is time to get back to basics and learn many of those unwritten traits of our old tradies, where trust was given to those working, to manage and grow the learning of risk rather than restricting them with blanket rules. Blanket rules can turn off our thinking and respect for risk learning.

Safety roles have evolved, they now need to be good coaches & mentors for leaders and workers, they must be great at communicating and consulting, flushing out the hidden risks. Gone are the days of policing safety, we know it doesn’t manage risk, instead it creates an undercurrent of by-products that we will be blinded to. 

This is not about changing, it is about learning and progressing to a better level of risk management, you cannot really change culture through enforcement, but through learning, colaboration and development we can evolve and become a culture we want to be. The old saying “Rome wasn’t built in a day, but it burned in one.” Culture is no different, it takes time to influence and progress culture, it doesn’t happen overnight, yet it only takes one bad leadership decision to start destroying organisational culture.

 

“Great minds discuss ideas to learn & improve; average minds discuss events & failure; small minds discuss excuses why they cannot change.”

Dennis Millard