Today marks the anniversary of the Pike River mining disaster here in New Zealand. I thought it appropriate to post this introduction from Challenging the Safety Quo. I do believe we’re making progress, but slowly.
On 19 November 2010, an explosion ripped through the Pike River Mine in the South Island of New Zealand. A second followed soon after.
29 men died.
Fathers. Brothers. Sons.
In any such disaster, more lives are ruined than those that are taken directly. In a small community such as this, the impact was particularly devastating. The disaster triggered a response that had a much broader impact than simply on this mine or this industry.
The safety record of New Zealand’s industry was already under scrutiny due to perceived poor performance in comparison with other developed countries. In the wake of Pike River, industry scrutiny gave way to a public clamour for change, for improvement and for accountability. The government duly obliged.
An independent task force was established to review industry performance across all sectors. A Royal Commission investigated the Pike River tragedy. The regulator was shaken up, given more independence and more resources. Legislation was changed. Targets were set and promises made. It took five and a half years for new legislation to be enacted and come into force.
Will it work?
Who knows?
Perhaps (and hopefully) it will, but history suggests otherwise. Similar, previous tragedies triggered similar responses and similar issues are playing out all around the world as various governments and agencies attempt to come to grips with the problem. In the UK, Flixborough prompted changes in the 1970s; Piper Alpha prompted changes in the 1980s. Union Carbide’s facility in Bhopal provoked a similar outcry. And there are many others – Texas City, Longford, Deepwater Horizon, Chernobyl, Seveso . . .
So this has happened over and again, for the last 40 years. Yet here we are, still failing to provide safe workplaces for our colleagues. Nor is this confined to major disasters with multiple fatalities. While general accident rates across industry have been in general decline for some time, serious injuries and fatalities have not shown a similar reduction – either reducing much more slowly, plateauing, or in some cases, increasing.
Why is that? Based on the rhetoric after each tragedy, these issues should be sorted out by now:
“We must do better; bad practices will be weeded out and poor performers prosecuted under the new laws…”
“ We’ll look further and delve deeper to root out the bad apples…”
“We will hold up, reward and recognise good performers; identify best practices and share them.”
But, do we actually know what best practices look like? What if our current view of what is good is completely wrong? What if we’re looking in all the wrong places?
These questions are currently being asked and the safety status quo – the safety quo – is being challenged. Unseen by most of the outside world, there is a debate raging in the safety profession. In on-line forums, at conferences, seminars and in safety publications people are beginning to question some of the most well established principles of safety management. Safety as a profession is going through a mid-life crisis.
Some of the theories behind these challenges are well developed, particularly in academia, but in industry many organisations are very much behind the times and haven’t yet got up to speed. Other theories are cutting edge and leading to howls of indignation from defenders of the safety quo, but are gradually gaining support as a few lone voices become a groundswell of opinion.
This change is needed because the truth is that safety is broken. There are pockets of excellence, there are good quality people working very hard and with the best of intentions. We have made significant progress since the days when major projects budgeted for a certain number of fatalities. But, by and large, the safety profession is frowned upon. What is the general response across industry (or in your business) when the safety person gets involved in a conversation, or arrives at a site to observe work? Or when a new revision of the safety paperwork is issued? Are these welcomed with open arms? Are they seen as a positive inclusion to keep us all in one piece? No, they are not. There is a general rolling of eyes and resigned shrugging of shoulders, if not outright hostility.
How did we come to this? Everybody at work wants to go home fully intact. Nobody wants to die on the job, or be seriously injured. How did we get to the stage where the people charged with helping to support that most fundamental of requirements – staying alive – are almost universally disparaged? On face value, it seems remarkable. Businesses ask how they can make their workers more engaged in safety. But it is surely the natural state for people to be engaged in their own safety. In fact, it is an evolutionary imperative. The question business should be asking is, therefore, why are they disengaged and what is the business doing to contribute to it? Once that is answered they can stop those activities that are actively disengaging their workers from safety.
Of course, safety is not the only department that strikes fear into the heart of the rest of the business. Procurement, accounting, IT and legal also tend to have the same chilling effect. But this is largely a function of the bureaucracy of big business and differs in two ways. Firstly, they tend to impact more on the back-office staff who are at least paperwork-savvy rather than the front-line with their almost pathological distaste for reams of paper. Secondly, disengagement in the process of dealing with these departments usually has little more effect than some delays and productivity inertia. Damaging to the business perhaps, but not disabling to individuals. To re-balance and to improve our safety performance we need strong leadership – this is something that everyone agrees with. And to paraphrase Peter Drucker, leadership is not about doing things right, but about doing the right things.