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.”