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.
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