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CRITIQUE TO $AFETY & RI$K

The critical thinking safety pragmatist

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You may think by this loud presentation of safety cynicism that I despise safety, but read carefully and with an open mind and with no bias views and just maybe you will see that I am very passionate and concerned about the result of safety. So I dare you to take the journey to find out

WHO PULLS THE ROI LEVER

 

 

Sapere aude

"Safety won't improve because we have priced ourselves out of practicable safety practice. We as a collective society are not prepared to pay for reasonable safety time as we want everything cheap and we want it today. If I said that I was introducing a safety tax...people would jump up and down because we are not prepared to pay for this level of safety, so when a worker dies of what i have named 'Pressure Induced Inconvenient Event' (PIIE) because of some cost cutting exercise, or because of pressure to produce (PTP) maybe we are all to blame. Cheap clothes, cheap technology, cheap food etc are all cheap because we ignore those things that give safety, and human rights to fair work conditions; what we fail to see is what  we fail to do" MD

There are few, if any moral, open and transparent corporations, and they do not allow for people to choose thinking or innovate safety; these two things cost money

SAFETY IS NOW A GUI$E 

Have a guess for what!

 

It’s despairingly funny...As an experiment I have contacted executive managers and leaders via email to advise of what I had observed and risks being taken in their organisations...To no surprise to me, I had not one reply; officers don't care. All I will do is wait until someone gets hurt or killed, then offer my knowledge.

Why are people so foolish and naïve to think big business is really concerned with people, safety and the environment...THEY ARE NOT!
I myself have seen enough in my time in safety to get out of the ass covering and fear industry, as not one company I have worked for was proactive in risk mitigation and all covered up and or downplayed incident causalities.
(story on Safety HERE)

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Welcome to the critical thinking pragmatist viewpoint on safety in today’s working environment.

What is the critical thinking pragmatist point of view on safety? Safety has become a sector full of, unethical ass covering methods, self proclaimed experts who have not worked in the sector, but who have all the answers, legal fear mongering, trivial jargon and over complicated safety systems and topics that have been introduced, invented, reinvented, plagiarised, altered, made up, and lied about by people looking to cash in or to make their role seem significant and indispensable. Safety is a multibillion dollar industry and many are out to protect their incomes.

My core philosophy is doing what we have in place now (simple first HERE) and get this right and in practice, before going hunting for the new complex thing that promises to fix safety. As I have said many times; I have not seen or been in an organisation that has done risk management properly (the basics). Maybe if we focused on this simple approach and did the what is advertised via laws and best practices etc to its practicable best, many incidents would not occur. We should only move up into more complex topics once we know about the basic, but one would have to ask, would there be a need to make something more complex if the simple was being practiced?.  

I look at all these new safety ideas/systems coming out by safety experts and how they claim they will 'save safety' with such overkill topics as psychology and BBS and not to mention Safety II and Safety Differently, it is such a con on the context collective mindsets won't change, humans are humans. If you train a person the best way, give them the best tools and equipment, and do not pressure them, the rest will fall into place (including safety) if they are intrinsically motivated, how hard is that!

"If 80% of people don't enjoy their jobs and even a higher number of people are not in the right role, what hope have we got to motivate people with safety when money is the motivator. It's time to accept that incidents occur because most people are not intrinsically motivated doing what they want, they are pressured to work and forced into slave labour HERE all in return for; what we are sold as a normal existence or the humanised way"  MD

We are wasting so much money, time and effort on safety programs, we employ safety people who make no real improvement in safety (nothing others like foreman and managers could not do as mindful people), and like the constant changes in government who still have not fixed education, health, and jobs, there is no long term plan in our mist. If safety was not a requirement (law & reputation) there would be very few organisations that would even contemplate having a specific safety department or safety workers. They would see (as I do) that safety is as easy as having managers, foreman and other leaders promoting safety in an everyday manner, that giving training and providing good tools and equipment is the most fundamental aspect of providing safety (have these things and safety will result). Honestly, do we really need a safety person or manager advising people to be safe...think about it (to many topics make up safety...safety is many things). Research into why most incidents happen and you will see there is not much that could be done to stop having these incidents in our current pressured and stresses environment that is full of poor plant and equipment and greedy organisations. Safety today is all about protecting organisations (and now their officers) from lawsuits and fines. Its about keeping a score so they can be seen as the 'safe' company so they can win the next contract. 

It is a sad state of affairs when a law (harmonisation 2012) like here in Australia, has to be introduced, to make officers interested in safety as if they had no responsibility in the first place!. If these officers where proactive and responsible in safety to start with, such a law would not have been needed now would it...but this prove my point about collective safety not improving, as I cannot see how introducing a law will control safety in the context of mindfullness! 

Then we get safety websites that constantly compare risk taking in extreme sport and life (see one of my many replies to this site HERE) with risk taking in the workplace (Embracing risk HERE). I do not think these people understand risk management in the workplace context; and are heavily influenced by childhood learning and meaning of life. Workplace risk management is where the risk assessments (simplistic to complex) give what risk is to be taken, risk is mitigated and controlled...not taken.

In sport and in life we do need to take risks to feel alive, but this risk is on the person, not an organisation. In an organisation you should respect that risk taking is not to be taken lightly. Allowing for people to make their own choice on risk is naive thinking as not all people have a good risk appitite.

These sites also promote psychology as the next big thing, yet much of what they say is impractical, irresponsible and dangerous (such as telling us to be loose on law and rules and unlearn orthodox safety). They also just basically cover the topic of consultation, which is reframed in many different ways to make it sound new and complex. I have also not seen any actions of what we can do but lots of what has happened (psychology is retrospective). I see a lot of comments about finding a middle ground, but no examples. They say we need less rules but don't give what one should go, they say we need to reduce paperwork but don't say which paperwork. The reason is that they cannot give examples. So I have to ask...WHAT ARE THEY SELLING? how to be a moral human? what is moral? 

I also see that academics HERE rule the world of safety. It is almost like they are the only ones who have a thinking brain (so what they went to uni and memorised data, this is nothing to do with thinking), the rest of us are just there to follow their every word as gospel. The academics are themselves so cynical about many things in safety (even though they despise the cynical term and blame this as a major contributor to a toxic environment) yet they fail to acknowledge that it is their academic friends who create how safety is to work.

The safety person/department is left to carry the weight of this collective safety failure and is often called many negative terms, such as spudheads or fun police by experts who seem to want to segregate safety even further. If safety people are being called spud heads (people who are shaped to suit others), then I would have to ask who creates them? if safety people are spud heads for taking their role seriously, then so must be police, military personnel and anyone else who has to follow rules to do their job.

Being a safety person I believe has to return back to the role of advisor, auditor, collaborator and investigator, nothing more and nothing less. They have to stop being shaped into roles and responsibilities that suit others HERE out of convenience and cost cutting. Even the term environment should be taken out of the HSE tittle. Environmental care is a specialised area, and I doubt many in safety would know much about environmental studies. Its a specialist role such as psychology, learning etc. This is why I say safety is made up by many things. Safety is not something you can do!

Many specifically trained experts are trying to add to the role of a safety advisor as a way to market/sell some safety system/concept and business accepts this because it is cheaper to have a multi-skilled role to save money than having to employ the expertise of another for a specific sector. If you break down the role a safety person today, there is a low percentage of role congruence being applied to the practice of safety and risk management. It is mostly reviewing lots of meaningless paperwork, preparing reactive investigation reports, doing trivial audits that really result in no actions, training work topics that they themselves have little experience in, assessing, filling out return to work forms, attending training on how to "become", and lots of other mundane stuff that is secondary to proactive safety. 

I am the point that I really think there is no need for safety people if we continue down this pathway of expecting the safety person to be all they are not. One company I worked for said the role of safety is now 80% training and assessment. In this case the role tittle should be renamed, but then this would not meet the complience of safety coverage!.

The safety person has become the scapegoat for the true leaders within the organisation. Ownership of safety is constantly expressed by some experts as the responsibility of safety people and departments. There are self claimed safety experts writing topics on some safety web sites that say safety people need to be "change/culture managers" HERE and should have expertise in all manner of topics such as psychology, teaching, and language. It is a dam shame these people add to the confusion and negative discourse in safety. If these people had actually been in front line safety, they would know the i$$ues. Being a consultant, or coming into safety via other accidental means, does not give this level of understanding.

From my leanings and understanding in safety; you can have the best SMS, expertise experts, award wining logos and posters, and all means of other purchased silver bullets, but none of these will make a dam bit of difference to the fact that; pressure has the greatest influence on negative outcomes. Almost all incidents I have investigated or have learned about occurred due to something that was forced by pressures/demands.

For some reason in our optimistic safety world, these pressure/greed topics hardly get raised, its always something else; like workers not concentrating. I think over time we will see this topic of pressure/greed creep into expert writing more as they will soon see what I have been saying all this time. There is no method that can change the drive to make profit, its what business is about.

 

Safety will never succeed under pressures realm!

 My meaning of Pressure Induced Inconvenient Event (PIIE); something that happened, that those in control wish did not, but knew could happen, but did nothing, because of the pressure to accomplish something, which was coerced upon regardless of any cost.

Why did I come up with this term? Why PIIE? -- because from my research, pressure (time, money, reputation etc) is the main causality of many incidents. You cannot dispute the evidence of this unfortunate drive we have to produce all sorts of things in the shortest, cheapest ways.. 

We all work in a society/culture that creates pressures and it is us who create it; it is then these pressures that are the main causality of almost all incidents both directly and indirectly within the working sector (indirectly would be such things as stress related deaths). Safety is not the number one key objective in the workplace as commonly heard, its growth, success and money. Frontline human workers are for a better part just a replaceable collateral cog in this whole process, a necessary means to an end that provides profit.

Work kills so many people each year (more than we dare to know outside the documented 160 odd per year in Australia) that we really do need a minute of silence and a ceremony each year to respect the dead and injured. If as many soldiers died or were seriously injured each year at work, there would be an outcry. NOW there is an idea someone can advertise to make them known, the workers in which we respect foundation!.

 

"Tell me how any safety program/system can reduce

pressure to produce (PTP)

and then I may listen, for

Pressure is the antecedent to almost all tragic events" MD

The way some people are subjected to pressures at work, the tasks some people are made to do in my eyes is not to dissimilar to acts of terrorism (the corporate version that subjects their workers to fears of job security). The terrorists being the officers, shareholders and or owners of organisations who inconveniently ignore safety issues to ensure there is no negative effect of profit or reputation. We all have seen the media coverage of one gunman holding up a café in Sydney, and that it seems to me that having a gun and holding people hostage is different to holding a worker hostage with pressures and forcing them to risk their life doing an unsafe task. How many flowers and tributes do the 160 plus killed workers get each year, let alone any mention in the news. A soldier gets killed doing their job and we have a state funeral and all sorts of support is offered. A worker gets killed and it’s kept quite. Do you get my point; workers who die are treated like robots. Its time to respect the workers who are killed and make note how devastating the workplace can be. Its also time these officers get named and demoted from managing organisations. To many of these officers who have ignored safety to gain profit are still out their putting people at risk. These people are criminals!!!



I am not holding this gun to your head, but...if you don't ignore safety procedures, cut some corners, and hurry up
YOU'RE SACKED

I have been raising this topic of pressure induced inconvenient events (PIIE) for a while because accidents and incidents don't really relate to me anymore: As pressure/greed makes for unsafe workplaces. While some try and steer clear of this pressure topic, and while some experts are cynical and critical of my thinking, this site will give the evidence to why we have tragic events occurring and why most safety noise being sold today won’t make a dam bit of difference. If people don't go to work to hurt themselves then selling a new how to not hurt yourself is not going to do anything. Selling somthing that says why we may do something is also not a tangable solution.

Pike River was a Pressure Induced Incident, the NASA Challenger shuttle Incident was a Pressure Induced Incident, Deepwater Horizon was a Pressure Induced Incident, Longford was a Pressure Induced Incident, Beaconsfield mine collapse, the guy who lost his fingers in a machine, and the girl who cut her finger while hurrying to staple paperwork for her boss  and many many more. Many Incidents are borne form the pressures of supply and demand to make money. Not many are talking about this Pressure Induced issue because it’s to confronting and truthful. This topic goes against the key principle of business "grow grow grow". There is not a lot anyone can do about this issue of pressure and greed, which is why you don't see experts selling solutions for this key issue.

Pressure to supply (make money) stops training from being done, Pressure to supply stops maintenance programs, Pressure to supply creates stress, Pressure to supply causes unhealthy competition, Pressure to supply neglects the human needs of safety and community, and Pressure to supply makes people do negative things and deviate from the acceptable and the rules.

The reason most of these experts who are trying to sell their trivial systems do not like my opinion, is because there is nothing they can sell that will slow or undo pressure related factors (time, money, reputation). A company will not purchase any system that reduces a profit margin by increasing time delays. Time delays that would give some practicable time to work though safety issues and real preventive actions. Workers for a better part cannot even do a safety procedure properly because they are told to hurry up. Workers who are supposed to be participating don't say anything because they will get the look. How can anyone take this topic serious in this sort of environment. This is why I get upset when some experts say to unlearn safety topics. If we just started to do Risk Management as its supposed to be done, many incidents would not occur.

So, the pressures I am discussing in my philosophy are those that cause deaths and serious injuries to people and which also degrade our fragile environment. In our culture, we are not allowing ourselves to be appropriately time managed. By this I mean we do not cost out tasks on a fair level of  safe labour effort. We continually under the realm of profiteering/greed cut back on labour time to meet a deadlines and expectations. If we were doing safety properly there would be a 15% safety component added to all jobs (6hrs a week in a 40hr week given to safety). So sadly, these profiteering inspired leaders continue to ignore the real issues of safety (the ones that cause the most risk) and continue to hope luck will see them through.

We have been trying to make safe “safety” for many, many years, yet sadly, a mean level of incidents still occur relative to work task, laws and safer technologies, we are at a constant mean level.

We cannot unconditionally make safe safety, but business continually accepts any new concept in hope this will solve the issue of perpetual inconvenient events from happening in their workplace. But as I keep saying; there is no cure for this corporate/social greed. We all want this fast and cheap.

This continual acceptance of safety concepts is in itself driven by greed, as safety is related to profiteering (a low LTI rate will win contracts, it will mitigate litigation and lower downtime). Its not about the worker, its about the fear of having a strike against your name. I know the sugar coated spiel we hear all the time about CEOs etc not wanting to hurt workers (we all should want this just as we want no children starving in Africa), but in reality, they can’t reduce risk to ALARP, for if they did, they would send their business broke just as we all would go broke if we all donated money to save 3^rd world poverty. No CEO will ever say that safety is not their number one priority (it's immoral), just as much as they will not say their products are cheap and made with slavery.

In safety, we need to concern ourselves with lowing risk to As Low As Reasonably Practicable (ALARP). Now, this is a broad term, but its massage is profoundly simple; use what we know or have access to, to keep risk mitigated. It is a simple philosophy yet not well practiced through Risk Management. The two main reasons for this ignorant laziness I feel is; 1) that we cannot accept that we have reached the equilibrium point of risk v reward and 2) that even simple safety costs time and money.

Take for example the simple task of conducting a job safety procedure (JSA, SWMS, SOP, etc). I have yet to see this process conducted with due practicability from initiation to revision outside those specialist sectors that respect procedures. While this is a simple process and it method well documented, its endeavour is mostly vast and complex, which is why most risk management fundamentals are not done and why many don’t take it seriously Only time can grant an endeavour and a practicable outcome, and what do we know about time?

Simple does work as has been working very well (as our death rates are stable) for years, yet we still continue to believe that we can control the human mind, randomness, uncertainty and fallibility by implementing some new silver bullet idea in hope of gaining perfection (or zero). It is this dissonance that keeps pushing us towards seeking dominion of natural/instinctual governance.

Some sites claim that psychology, learning and behaviour based safety is the answer, but I have argued many times that this is also a fallacy. It’s a fallacy simply based on the fact that pressure to produce (PTP) manipulates principles and decisions we make regardless of anything we are educated or trained in.

Many good leaders make bad choices under pressure, and no leader I know practices how to handle pressure for any given scenario let alone one they have know idea about. We are dealing with unpredictable humans. Our knowledge of the human mind is constantly changing with new evidence derived from sciences every day. It is for this reason I continually say that we know very little about us, This is why I also say that we need to be careful adopting new ways because some study was done. I also have to mention this is why I am very cynical about some professionals/experts who claim they know everything. They could know everything about a particular topic because they read it, but this data that filled their empty vessels could be wrong and out-dated.

I have had some strong opposition from some experts on pressure produced inconvenient events, yet this topic is a major causal factor, if not the highest causality factor in almost every tragic incident around the world from minor to catastrophic.

So this site is going to reveal safety in a reality based cynical manner using critical thinking and my own philosophy derived from my time in safety. I will respond to other topics written on other sites and give my opinion to these. I will also analyse and seek clarity on topics that seem to be bias towards the promotion of their ideology.

I am not out to attack others or demean others (although some deserve it as they dish it out), I am challenging their views and opinions. I know far too well that we know very little about most things in life, and in particular about how our brain works. We may think we know everything but I cannot subscribe this principle as history has constantly showed we are ever-evolving and ever-learning and ever full of mistakes. So just because some PHD or Dr has written a paper or conducted a study, does not mean it's correct for today's workplace.

Click photo to see my concern about GREED, I am not alone in my thinking in relation to the sad state of the world. While MaxQ is talking about social dystopia, corporate greed is always true here in safety also, and we are all afraid of law and or being in the out-group for raise concerns. While I wish for freedom and less laws, humankind cannot be trusted with such liberty as well proven by history. So we make fear as a way to control us, this is true in safety also.

"And the corporate snakes coming in to feed

On that pathetic fact known as human greed

Skin and bone being raked over those hot coals

This dump never seems to give time for human soul

And all those things that we have learnt

No time for questions, you'll just get burnt

You'll just get burnt"

I could easy relate this verse above to workers being killed and injured due to PIIE, we have no time to answer questions, if you do ask, you're targeted as a trouble maker. I have been forced to leave jobs because I did my job to well, think I am up myself saying this? well I have much evidence (emails, voice recordings etc) that will show I am a victim of people protecting whatever to keep their jobs and or not having blame put onto the organisation. See when I work, I say it how it is and go deep to find real causal factors while other safety people are watching movies and talking about girls in the office. I am not afraid like so many are, I speak up, show the real evidence (people who really care often get punished). I will say to any new safety person wanting to do the right thing, don’t...I was a fool, so learn from my foolishness. Thinking there is such a thing as a just culture... The only job for me would be an external investigator or auditor, because I cannot work “in” an organisation that has no interest in real proactive safety, where taking shortcuts are the norm, where managers don’t leave their offices, where workers group together to have the safety by numbers mindset and where all blame is on the workers.