What’s happening when nothing is happening?

“80% of accidents are caused by unsafe acts.” Have you ever heard a statement like that? Maybe the numbers were different or maybe it was something like “most accidents are caused by human error” or “improper planning causes most injuries” or something similar. Phrases like these are very common and they often are said by people who seem like authorities or experts.

But where do statements like this come from?

If you think about it, it’s accident investigations. People look at an accident and try to figure out what went wrong and if they see a pattern of these things going wrong in multiple different kinds of accidents, then they make statements like that.

The interesting thing about statements like “most accidents are caused by unsafe acts” is that it’s not a statement simply designed to tell you about accidents. It’s a statement designed to help you improve safety. You see, in safety our main way to find opportunities to improve is to look for what is causing our accidents and then to find ways to stop that from happening in the future. So, if we say that “improper planning causes most injuries” then the implication is that we need to have proper planning in order to not have accidents. Makes sense, right?

Here’s the problem – if we say that most accidents are caused by something, what percent of non-accidents also have that something? So, if we say that improper planning causes most injuries, what percent of jobs that do not have an injury also have improper planning? Wouldn’t we want to know that? After all, if we find that most jobs have improper planning, wouldn’t that mean that there’s no way that improper planning alone could cause an incident? What’s happening all those times when we have improper planning and no incident?

Think about that for a second. Most jobs have no injuries or accidents associated with them. Do we know why? Not really. We’d like to think it’s because of our safety programs, but do we know for sure? Probably not. Is it luck then? Also, probably not, because no one is that lucky.

This is the essence of something you’ve heard us talk about called Safety-II. In Safety-II we ask, ‘what’s happening when nothing is happening?’ The reason we ask this is because often we don’t really know what’s stopping us from having an accident or injury on a day-to-day basis. And if we could know that, if we could answer the question about what’s happening when nothing is happening, we might identify that we are focusing on the wrong things.

For example, we at SCM believe that the reason most people believe that most accidents are caused by unsafe acts or errors is because most people don’t bother looking the rest of the time. If you look at everyday work you see people doing many of the same things, adjusting what they do to get work done. This doesn’t make it right. But it does suggest that perhaps focusing on the action itself isn’t right. Perhaps we should focus on what’s pushing people to make that adjustment in the first place (e.g., production pressures, resource issues, etc.). Alternatively, we might find out what’s making it so we don’t have an accident even when people do make those adjustments, which may allow us to identify new ways to plan our work so that people don’t have to be perfect to not have an accident.

Our challenge to you this week is to ask the question, what’s happening when nothing is happening? You might go out and observe workers and ask them what challenges they overcome to get work done? Or what’s something you wish OSHA knew about your job? Or what’s the dumbest thing we ask you to do around here? For each of these questions, if the workers feel comfortable enough to answer you, you’ll start to uncover the messy details of work that people deal with. You’ll find out about the things that people feel the need to shortcut or where mistakes are likely. And that will allow you to start getting proactive about dealing with these issues, rather than waiting for incidents to show up.

So go out, do a little Safety-II this week, and find out about the messy details of work. Let us know what you find!

-Ron Gantt, HSE Director – Americas, Yondr