Safety Wars
That Safety Triangle
March 16, 2021
A frank discussion of the Safety Triangle. Triggered by the Rated R-Safety Show. A longer program than usual.
This is this show is brought to you by Safety FM. The following program is read for mature audiences and may contain adult language, adult situations and frank safety discussions. The names in certain details have been changed to protect the safe and unsafe. But believe me, every item in here is true. This is Jim polls with safety wars, safety triangles. What the heck is the safety triangle? Isn't a force for good or a force for evil? I'll attempt to answer that question today. This morning, on the rate of our safety show, Dr J. Allen discussed the safety pyramid. J is the chief safety officer of Safety FM, which is program is a part of. I'm sure he triggered more people than just me. So what is the safety pyramid? It is the conceptual diagram that behavior based safety is based on and originally was proposed by Herbert Heinrich. Back in the 19 thirties, Heinrich worked for an insurance company, and he came up with this triangle based on the statistics of accidents that he was investigating. Picture this at the bottom row of the pyramid, there are near misses for every 300 near misses incidents without injuries or damage. There are 30 incidents on top of it that caused some kind of damage and one major accident later on. Another researcher in the 19 sixties named Frankfurt expanded on this concept and came up with some different numbers. But the same idea. His numbers are that for every 600 near misses, there are 30 minor accidents, 10 serious accidents and one fatality. So incomes, behavior based safety. The theory is that if you reduce the number of at risk behaviours at the bottom of this triangle, you reduce the likelihood of an accident on the top. So where is this system promoted as promoted by a majority of safety professionals and virtually all industries? This sounds good, right? Reduce at risk behaviors. This is how it really is implemented. In my experience in the construction environmental industries, nothing has caused more bad blood between management workers and safety people than this triangle, one assumes, is that there is no penalty for reporting near misses and negative audits, and that we are all here to report objective things. What happens? It evolves into this one. Blame the worker for at risk behaviours because 80% of accidents are caused by unsafe acts and not unsafe conditions. Further promote the bad apple theory. This is number two of the 19 twenties, where you need to get rid of bad apples to make work safer and better. It disincentivize is what it is intended to promote openness and teamwork. Here is one real world example. Some of my listeners will know the story already. I was on a huge project that heavily promoted this behavior based safety system. We had a system in place to report near misses. We had safety audits almost every day. We had a team audits as a team. We had everything else that went along with it. The tracking computer programs excels French, and you name it. We had it. So what happened when an accident happened? You got it right. Blame the worker. God forbid. If you are the one who was identified at doing risky things or if a manager had a problem with you, you would then become the bad apple. I need to be eliminated. So what happened? Safety became dis incentivized. Worker worked against worker teammate against teammate Foreman against worker worker against Foreman, foreman and worker against manager and everybody against the safety person. This facility went one step beyond all of us. They said that if an incident happened, that meant that you deliberately did not report hundreds of near misses and thousands of other unsafe acts. And you are not doing your job because if you reported this stuff, we wouldn't have had this if we were able to identify this stuff, we were unable to fix it and you were not there to fix it. Everyone needed to get in with the program. You talk about a toxic workplace, that company, and it's a huge one, I assure you, all of you have heard of has had a reputation for this type of behavior that they have not been able to shake even 20 years later. I didn't realize how bad it was until I wore a T shirt from that company 500 miles away from that facility and was asked and taken off because people had such bad experiences with them and they were being triggered by them. You talk about PTSD and I don't take that lightly. People actually had PTSD from working there. They named the management group by name. I mean individuals, and it was far from the last time I ever had to hear about them. I most recently heard about them by name last week. Another example. Another facility had a great program based on behavior based safety. It was great until we were on the receiving end of a couple of bad audits and a mid level manager came down and cursed us out MF to us and screamed and yelled because his manager got upset with some bad audits and, as they say, move no rolls downhill. But in reality, the audits are normal audits, nothing really out of the ordinary. So I thought right he essentially destroyed any goodwill the safety department had with anyone else singlehandedly and completely destroyed the company culture for safety. Safety went downhill from there, and it was right from one manager doing that. One of the huge incentives for managers is to reduce at risk behavior because attention is special away from them when something goes wrong. One disclaimer. Here, mature managers are fully self actualized. Don't do this kind of stuff. The incentive for this type of manager right is never to go further down the triangle and address what's underneath at risk behaviours. It's attitudes, values, physical knowledge and execution fact and what the incentives are in the system that lead to those at risk behaviours. My opinion why they don't address it because then the finger goes to them and they have to change their own system, and it takes away from everything else that they have to do, which is produced a product at a cheap cost. Rather, you're doing construction, manufacturing or what have you any time that they're distracted by that. It seems that they feel their bottom line is shot, but they don't look at the other side of this where if you get hurt, there is a cost to that. And if there is an incident, there is a cost to that, and that takes off your bottom line. But that's a discussion for another show. So what's the safety person to do? Were often put into the middle of this thing and get the ire of both management and the workers further making us the focus of derision. So what do we do with all this? How do we fix this situation? First? You need to decide if the organization is fixable. If you see three people refuse to listen to you, refused to listen to anyone else and are okay with a toxic work environment, they may be unfixable. And at that point you have to make a decision whether you're going to leave or not, or continue to be hated by everyone. If you can get to see three people to listen to you or someone else, make it happen. Remember, you have to meet people where they are. As an industry, we have invested time millions, perhaps billions of dollars in these programs. Everyone acknowledges to some point that these things really aren't working to drive us down to the zero goal that everybody wants to get to. That, in my opinion, is a fantasy, so they're not going to change so easily. Here on Safety FM, there's a lot of good information on error modes put out by Todd Conklin, J. Allen and many of the other hosts investigates some of those because behavior based safety maybe putting you into a more riskier error mode, which is causing an increase in accidents. So learn about human and organizational performance, also known as hop safety to learning teams, et cetera. Try to implement those philosophies into your organization. One way to start to change is to change yourself and get out of these negative ways of managing people. Find out what works and doesn't work in your organization. Maybe a hybrid of H. O P and B B s. A lot of these workplaces have a combo of both that are successful with safety. I think getting the best of both worlds might be something we strive for. The bottom line of that darn triangle is negative attitudes and values. Those are the building blocks you need to address, regardless of what you do. But they may also be the hardest. If you do address them, your job becomes a lot easier and your work a better place. Overall, remember, denial is deadly, and hope is not a strategy for safety wars. This is Jim Puzzle, your humble safety professional. The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the host and its guests and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the company. Examples of analysis discussed within this podcast are only examples. It should not be utilized in the real world as the only solution available as they are based only on very limited in dated open source information. Assumptions made within this analysis are not reflective of the position of the company. No part of this podcast may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means mechanical, electronic recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the creator of the podcast. Jay Allen, Yeah.