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Human Rysk uses sound knowledge of social psychology and our extensive experience working across a range of different industries including quarries, harbour and marine, refineries, manufacturing, construction health, retail and food industries

Making Sense of Risk and Decision Making in Safety

As Health & Safety professionals, perhaps it is worth considering that over time we have relied too heavily on organizational systems, processes, ‘common sense’ and rational-only approaches to understanding and managing risk.  When possibly we should be investing more time and effort into understanding how each of us is human, innately complex and fallible.  The process of making decisions, judgments and sense making in our world is inherently subjective, social and complex.

The ‘science’ of cognition invests its focus in the physicality of the brain and tends not to entertain the notion of ‘thinking outside of the brain’ or that any form of ‘thinking’ resides in other bodily organs.  However, science supports the idea of an unconscious mind, which is neither rational nor irrational, and that these minds are ‘non-rational’.

Research by Kahneman, Norretranders, Bargh, Wegner, Ariely, Fine and Gigerenzer demonstrates that the rational (or conscious) brain is rarely involved in our decision making. This is particularly the case in a range of unconscious or inner ‘states of mind’ for example:  anxiety, despair, fear, complacency, stress and functioning in ‘automatic’.

As humans, we undertake decisions and actions in three distinct ways. Even though humans have one brain, the mind operates at three speeds and in three distinct ‘functioning’ modes.  This has significant implications for how we assess and manage risk.  Many of the ways we seek to identify, manage and target risk considers only one mode of decision making, that of the rational mind.

We each constantly fluctuate between each of these minds as we go about decision making, judgment and What is the nature of human consciousness?  We fill up with emotion at the sound of music, can be transported to another place through the beauty of art or music and can be overcome by memories or emotions triggered by a simple smell, visual stimulation, music, food or touch without conscious intent.  We can operate machinery or drive a car in a trance, whilst concentrating on other things; and can complete work tasks with little thought or concentration.  Even when we make mistakes, we tell others ‘I wasn’t thinking’.  We get heartache through stress, and anxious and depressed seemingly without reason.

For centuries Tao Buddhism has believed in the concept of One Brain and Three Minds. Defined as Three Tan Tiens; these are the upper, middle and lower minds. Western society, Christian and Hebrew traditions know these as the Head, the Heart and the Gut.

The author of Brain Rules (2008) John Medina, discusses the evolution of the brain and mind in three unique stages. He labels these: the lizard brain, mammalian brain and human brain (Figure 1).

The internal feeling of emotion is highly personal, and can be somewhat confusing given that several emotions may be experienced at the same time; causing us to cloak or censor our emotions from the outside world.  We often resort to creating metaphors to describe our emotions, such as ‘a broken heart’ or ‘lump in the throat’.  At some point, we’ve all felt our heart racing when stressed or anxious, or we feel overwhelmed with emotion such as excessive guilt and fear, and feel physically sick or our gut aches. It is not uncommon for people who are not coping physically to go to the toilet, soil themselves, cry uncontrollably or have high blood pressure.  These sensations may come from the brain yet they trigger the body to shut down, and most importantly the sensations are felt in the heart and gut.

There are two forms of communications to the brain, bio-chemical and electrical. Information is constantly uploaded into our brain without our knowledge through the many senses of our body via these two processes. Our senses are not just our eyes, ears, touch, nose and taste.  How does gut feeling manifest and why? How do we sense we are wearing a watch on our wrist, shirt on our back or shoes on our feet?  And why are we not aware of the watch, the shirt or the shoes unless they are consciously brought to our attention?

We can think of our mind as an accelerator, which runs quite slowly when we’re in a rational or conscious state.  Norretranders tells us that this is approximately 16-40 bits/second.  In our rational state (Mind 1), we display high levels of consciousness.  Mind 1 is quite slow, and is where we do most of our logical, analytical and systematic thinking.  For example, when we’re working with systems i.e. reviewing JSAs, developing Work Methods Statements, reviewing risk registers or being engaged in safety conversations.  We seldom operate in Mind 1, in fact 98% of our decision making and enactment occurs in the arational or unconscious minds (Mind 2 and 3).  Mind 1 is utilized only when we stop, reflect and engage in systems or slow methodical tasks to work in analysis mode e.g. completing checklists or safety conversations.

The speed of our mind accelerates in Mind 2 as we work and learn over a period of time (through trial and error) to develop a range of processes called ‘heuristics’ or mental micro-rules.  The term ‘heuristics’ is referenced in HB327: 2010 (Communicating & Consulting About Risk), and enables humans to become more efficient as we gather new skills and become accustomed to what commences as ‘unfamiliar’ and with ongoing practice, becomes fast and frugal learning and action.  Whilst not fully in automatic, we are able to function much faster in this state.  Mind 2 is the experiential learning mind.

Mind 3 is exceedingly fast; processing information and exformation at approximately 10-11 billion bits/second.  This is where our intuition, ‘fight or flight’, ‘gut’ or ‘non rational’ thinking occurs, and is what scholars like John Bargh define as ‘automaticity’.  This is the type of thinking that enables us to act with intense speed and think later.  If a car is approaching you at speed as you step off the kerb, Mind 3 acts first without conscious intervention to move you out of the way of harm.  In this unconscious state, we are able to automate the majority of what we enact on a daily basis.

So the concepts of three minds and three speeds is nothing new. Yet, when it comes to the assessment and management of risk, human judgment and decision making, the idea of three minds remains largely ignored.  In safety generally, the idea of ‘risk management’ itself is understood as a technical and mechanistic process.

Research tells us a great deal about human ‘automaticity’.   Automaticity is when we make decisions and judgments by habits, in the ‘flow’, in the ‘zone’ or in a daydream. There are many ways we describe people’s judgments when they are functioning on automatic. Sometimes we lack the words and describe some judgments as simply ‘being emotional’. This happens sometimes when we are surprised by other’s judgments and decisions that don’t make sense to us.

Since cognitive researchers can factually demonstrate this, then why is it that safety disciplines actively choose to ignore these concepts and struggle with understanding how humans make decisions under pressure, stress or de-stress or what happens when we relax and function in automatic.  If we understand humans as fallible, then we would make better use of the systems we develop in order to manage risk.

One of the primary contributing factors to arational decision making is ‘flooding’.  This is when people get baffled by too much data, complex systems, unsolvable problems (wicked), excessive information and sensory stimulation. When we are flooded we tend to retreat to default mode. Sometimes we just ‘tick and flick’ checklists or, gloss over instructions or mentally become distracted or revert back to short-cuts. When people can’t cope, decision making becomes more arational and unconscious.

It is in the arational Minds 2 and 3 that people are ‘primed’ in their decision making. It is in Minds 2 and 3 that people work based on intuition, assumptions and heuristics; yet much of what we do to assess and manage risk is focused on the rational, systematic thinking of Mind 1.  Lack of understanding of the human unconscious decision making process in risk lends itself to embedding a system (rational) solution to a human (arational) conundrum.  If this is the case, we will continue to remain disconnected from risk. Evidence demonstrates that employees hurt themselves primarily in Minds 2 and 3, however management and safety systems tend to discipline the employee in Mind 1.  As much as we want people to make conscious decisions and be conscious of what they are doing when managing risk, it is inevitable that they will be working in automaticity.

How can we influence risk taking and all things safety, if we don’t understand how humans make judgments and decisions?  And furthermore, what does this mean for the management of uncertainty (risk)?

Dennis Millard and Dee Henshall

Reference: Dr Rob Long and related concepts

Risk Management Journey

Isn’t it interesting how life slowly changes the way we think about “safety”. For many years I have had the pleasure of working with many great people whose belief’s and opinions on safety are very similar to mine, however many that are completely different as well. That’s ok, if we all thought the same we would never learn new ways and never grow for the better. I like to look at organisations as a living organism, “they need to keep move and feeding on new things to maintain growth.”

Over my time in the safety profession I have experienced some pain in trying to understand how the hell we can stop hurting people and help them understand better ways to manage risk. This probably sounds familiar to most of you in industry as I think we all have felt the same. I have worked with and alongside companies that have very robust safety management systems, and we’ve tried strategies like “Mission Zero, Goal Zero, Safe Home Everyday;” yet we still end up with injuries?

Towards the later parts of my safety journey many businesses I have worked with have implemented Behavioural based Safety programs as it felt and looked like it was more focused on a solution for people taking risk. DuPont Stop Observation was the first one I encountered, and then experienced People Based Safety, Safe Start and of course (BST) Behavioural Science Technology. They all had great intent but still didn’t hit the benchmark I was looking for, when I introduced these programs you could see the expressions on the employees faces, as if we were introducing a “Goal Zero” program again and continued to injure people?

Unbeknown to me the piece of information that had me looking was from the Handbook 327, and AS/NZ 31000, there was this crazy words “Heuristics and Biases”. I decided to try learn more about this as it started to make sense from what I was seeing with our employees! The more I uncovered the more complex it looked, how on earth was I going to get this across to managers and employees? I also discovered heuristics was introduced in to communication consultation of risk due to all the injuries and fatalities.

I found some books from a Dr Rob Long, who discussed this in detail, but I was sceptical on what he was trying to say. It just seemed to be so left field to traditional safety and what I knew and believed in. I thought I would use some of his theory and introduce increments of it into my safety training. To my amazement it bloody worked! Up popped an educational course that was called “Social Psychology of Risk,” I registered, and boy was my journey about to change.

It turned out the lecturer was none other than Dr Rob Long himself. Now I felt like a duck out of water, it was all making sense what I was learning but I thought, “how was this not a part of legislation already?” It was so valuable but such a different way to understand risk. Social psychology is nothing new, however it is the first time the researched fundimentals have been introduced to risk! Finally, it made sense and allowed us to start developing and learning key tools and principles to apply to the workplace, and no it is not another fad like behavioural based safety.

As we started to develop key tools and principles, last year Safe Work Australia also began researching Mindfulness which is apart of Karl Wieck’s 12 principles of High reliability Organising (Social Psychology of risk) to help companies become more resilient when managing and understanding risk in safety.

Safe Work Australia are still in the process of coming up with these key learnings which are already available, if you would like to know more about them and how to develop your business into becoming more resilient with risk, there is an exciting course that is coming up in Brisbane on the 29th February – 2nd March 2016.

Don’t miss out and don’t be the last on a great journey of risk management in the workplace. As a Safety professional for over 20 years, I can say this is the best practice I have ever seen which allows us to really give businesses what they are looking for, and it is not overwhelming in more paperwork.

These crazy creatures called “humans,” are far more complex than we realise. How do we think that all we have to do is make people comply and discipline them if they don’t? We all see the world differently and all have different views and beliefs (biases) and that’s ok! Even our language can create by-products from the way people interpret what we say or don’t say, so the question is, what by-products is the language and culture in your company creating without you even knowing?

“Stay Safe by opening your minds to new learnings in risk and safety.”

Safety Journey

Thought I would share what I have experienced about Leading in Safety over the past few years working in the Queensland CSG Industry. I have recognised similarities through the language we use in industry and what the actual discourse for safety really is, when it comes to management trying to lead in the safety world.

Many Managers are so focused on compliance and legislation when it comes to how they want safety run in their business, statistics mean everything, “what can’t be measured can’t be fixed” is the general speak. This also then cascades down to the safety teams.

The Safety people tend to go straight to the old ways of safety, straight to the legislation, straight to leading as if the context doesn’t matter, then they tend to go straight to the Australian Standards 4801, straight to the codes of practice as if leading doesn’t matter. Every company I worked with talked about leading with safety but all they were really doing was leading with systems, and trying to get people to fit within the systems; so the people are really not considered. I believe we are over inundated with complex safety systems created by Australian Safety Standards, Businesses missions and any other safety expectations that may be forced upon us in a client / contractor situations. This alone is bounding the rationality of the Supervisors and their teams and what they do and do not focus on, which in turn impacts on the workers day to day activities where they are exposed to risk. The commonality in the approaches to safety is one that is mechanistic; safety systems, standards, equipment and people are seen as fixable objects, this I believe is true as they measure them all, including workers behaviour. The reason behaviour is measured, is to help the company’s change the behaviours of workers they feel are at risk of harm, still trying to fix not understand the human kind.

A few of the companies had Mission Zero, Zero Harm, Safe Home Everyday mission statements, which the Management teams seemed to be proud of and wanting to uphold for their company. Unfortunately the managers failed to see what the field employees really thought of the company missions. Every training session I ran always aired the dirty laundry, the people from the frontline would tell you, they thought it was a load of crap and impossible to achieve, they would say, “we are human, aren’t we”? The frontline workers understood we as humans are fallible, where as the leaders on the other hand would bring the person who “stuffed up” in to discipline, as they must have done it on purpose or not followed the rules (breached company policy and procedures). This approach is the kind for “absolutes” one who thinks they can fix and or have an answer to everything.

My observation was becoming clearer as time went on the leadership styles in safety were all about dictation and direction of the safety systems. The Safety Gestapo would start their crusade, making sure everyone was wearing their gloves and not using Stanley knives in case they cut themselves, make sure the “Life Saver Rules” were not breached. I remember thinking this is such a de-humanising mentality and felt for the workers involved. Yet when the leadership was challenged on the matter, they would say, “it’s for their own good” and leave it at that. Great intentions were meant perhaps, and probably to help gain their business trajectory, however with a horrible by-product, such as people doing the total opposite or just hiding what they do to get the job done. I felt that we were pushing people so hard not to think that even the simple things became a challenge, one of those was communication and engagement. Every incident had the contribution of the lack of leadership and or communication and engagement. Just confirming to me that people are not and cannot be robots, the businesses are caught up in a state of dissonance.

Understanding this, I developed a modulated leadership communication training process, which was hands on in the field, rather than classroom lecture. This was to help the leadership teams understand what leading with communication looks like and how it may be carried out and allowed them to do it in their own style. We did this in small-modulated sections in the field, so the leaders were not inundated with too much information, (Helping their learned intake). It was well received, by the field supervisors when I first trailed the modulated learning process, however was soon to be undone when the client wanted to make a procedure and training power point presentation telling the leaders how they were going to communicate.

Interestingly it really keeps taking me back to embracing the followers expertise and learnt knowledge, it’s what is called the followers gifts. Then it is really up to the leader to understand what the company’s aim is and using what valuable information they have received from their team to gain success, rather than try to think and do it all themselves. Is it why we employ personnel with qualifications, to use them and strengthen the company’s knowledge and skills? Is leading all about understanding the social arrangement of the work groups and how they engage, embrace each other, understanding how we all see the world differently? Or is it it all about power and authority to make safety work?

Is respecting each other’s ‘world views’ (critical reality) so important when we are to tackle wicked problems such as safety? Or should we just go by the legislation, codes of practice Australian standards and forget people’s views?

When I was given the opportunity to lead a Safety team in commissioning compression stations, I had the guys focus on striping down the amount of documents we were wanting in safety with consultation of the workforce, we went from having 6 safety documents per day per person to having only 2. This freed up the leaders time and made the workers happy that someone was listening to their ideas. We then guided the leaders to focus on opening up team discussions on risk management with the tasks at hand, in return it seem as if we were seeing less injuries, is this because of collaborative engagement and thinking?

It felt like it was teaching the leaders not to be dictators through power and authority but to become leaders through embracing, engaging and respecting their followers. Do leaders need to understand: Followers → Leaders → Leaders → Followers = knowledge of risk, or is it better to have a Leaders → Followers = obedience approach, to gain compliance?

Strategic Business Plans, hierarchically driven

When companies develop safety plans for work scopes, they tend to utilise what they consider as the experts for the task. Even today we notice key managers, leaders and safety personnel are the ones mainly relied upon to develop such plans and tasks. It is not often, prior engagement and communication is had with the laboring staff members who will be the ones to carry out the tasks. I remember on a large scale construction project, I was carrying out a site tour with a Safety Manager, when we came across a work group who were carry out tasks. We stopped to ask what it was they were doing, in response the workers said, “trying to work out this crap written on a bit of paper.” When we asked what seemed to be the problem, they said, “ no consideration for the real task risks are evident and there are many steps on the document that we simply can’t do the way its said they should be done, as there are other work fronts in our area which totally changes the way we would do the task.” They also had time pressure in front of them and when they raised the issue to management, they were told to stop making excuses to delay and to just follow the task plan. Even the safety manager whom I was with could not see a problem at first as he was one of the contributors to the document and felt they were trying to make an issue out of nothing. I learnt that they always used the sites hierarchy to develop job plans and the only time the workers were engaged was on the day they were to carry out the task. Due to time pressures and the hubris mentality driven by the so called experts, the workers were placed at more risk, there was no consideration for ambiguity on this site, equivocality was rife. When we discussed the issues with the workers and listened to what they really had to say, as well as their solutions, the job was stopped by the safety manager who felt embarrassed as the new suggestions from the workers made sense. Sensemaking is really hard to grasp if we do not consider the worldview of others. One really important message for me here was the company had failed their people, leading them towards error by thinking the experts were in the upper levels of the hierarchical organisational chart. The real experts here are the workers who were about to carry out the task, “how can we get this so wrong time and time again.” Collective mindfulness is not a term the company or I had ever heard of, nor did I understand it fully, until I recently learn about Karl E. Weick’s twelve constructs for high reliability organising.  How are we really managing safety in industry if we do not understand these critical constructs? How can we manage our strong safety biases, to allow us to learn these key concepts?  Plans don’t plan for the unexpected; plans can make us more mindless, which was evident on this site safety tour. The managers on this site like most of us did not like ambiguity so filled in the uncertainty by telling the workers to just get on with it, “how often do we see this?” The way Weick defines high reliability organising now sits in the forefront of my mind, “consensually validated grammar for reducing equivocality by means of sensible interlocked behaviours” Weick (1970, p. 3).

I for one am certain that we cannot be resilient in safety when we are so driven by hierarchical ways, and do not even consider Sensemaking and collective mindfulness. This is one of many events I have diarised through my career journey, which I am sure we have all experienced similar. I truly believe we need to share Weick’s research, thanks to my studies in social psychology of risk, which is exactly what I am going to do. Sharing more advanced knowledge on how to manage and respect risk in social environments is critical to our industries success.