Superstition Based Safety? by Phil LaDuke

Does this sound familiar: You do what all the experts say, you read articles on how the world’s safest companies, or you come back from a conference ready to implement the hot safety tool? But instead of creating your safety Utopia your efforts fall flat. You end up doing all the right things but—far from getting the remarkable improvements you’ve been expecting—your efforts fall flat. You end up trying idea after idea but nothing seems to make a difference.

I have been on far too many sales calls where I was stopped cold be the same objection: “we’re already doing that”. I would always get frustrated, because I in my arrogance I reasoned that given that I had invented this process there is no way on God’s green Earth that someone else was “already doing that”; except that they were.

It really messed with my head when I first realized that what I thought was this profound and innovative approach was being doing done by numerous other companies around the globe. I shouldn’t have been surprised, my approach is based on the practices and values of the world’s safest companies and since many of these practices were widely known and used it was reasonable for these people to believe that I had nothing new to offer. Except there was one important difference: my approach rapidly improved safety performance and drove down the monies companies spent on worker injuries—both the frequency and severity of injuries fell exponentially, so if these folks were doing the same thing, why weren’t they getting the same results?

I’ve spent a fair amount of time pondering how two so very similar approaches can produce such dramatically different results and I have reached several conclusions:

1. Requirements without Context. When people are given an assignment without a clear explanation of why they are doing it the behaviors become ritualistic. After a time these behaviors become deeply imbedded into the culture and since the population has no understanding of what these events are supposed to accomplish they just keep doing them often complaining bitterly that they are getting nothing out of the activity. Think of your safety meeting, what exactly are the expected, tangible outcomes? Do these meeting achieve these outcomes? Are achieving these outcomes worth the time and effort spent to achieve them. It’s important to recognize that people don’t always recognize ritualistic behavior (I’m not talking about drawing pentagrams on the floor after all).

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