Page 20 - Occupational Health & Safety, June 2017

SAFETY MANAGEMENT
Incremental rationalization creates risk blind spots by design.
If perfect strangers can stoically follow safety rules at 30,000 feet, so can workers at ground level.
cremental rationalization to validate one bad decision on top of another one.
We travel at the 55 miles per hour speed limit one day, then 60, then 65, then 70, then 75, then 80 on following days because nothing has ever happened; until it does. Then we are back to driving at 55 miles per hour. The issue comes in when incremental rationalization is not placed in check once in a while to confirm that one questionable action does not justify another.
Incremental rationalization can create a culture busting at the seams with bulletproof employees. This occurs when one risky ac- tion permitted today builds on more danger- ous actions tomorrow and even scarier ones the following day. Before long, you have em- ployees taking significant and unnecessary risks because nothing has ever happened in the past since leadership intervention has not discouraged their behavior.
Understanding how a bulletproof em- ployee reaches his or her conclusions is the first step in helping them make the con- nection. The fact is that their actions make perfect sense to them at the time. Bullet- proof employees do not view the risk they are taking as pertinent to their safety or the safety of others. The fact is leadership pro- cesses cause the bulletproof employee to behave the way they do. Focus on finding that faulty process.
Incremental rationalization creates risk blind spots by design. Not performing a detailed safety inspection of your car ev- ery time you drive it is a safety blind spot that we all create. How does this happen? It happens because we assign a low-risk fac- tor to the eventuality of a catastrophic ve- hicle failure. Our brakes always work, our horn, steering linkage and tires do, as well. Why check them every time? Bulletproof employees perform the same risk-based analysis at work. They view a high-risk outcome as not possible at the time an ac- tion is taken. They consider a risky choice as good if the result is consistently positive and bad if the outcome is not as expected. Expected results encourage the same risky behavior without leadership intervention and process modifications. A good strategy to implement is determining the risk fac- tors bulletproof employees consider having a higher importance than the real risks as- sociated with their actions.
Often, organizational pressures en- courage employees to undertake unmiti-
source, one of them makes the decision to strike a cigarette lighter for better visibility. That decision caused both to lose their lives as the ignition source, oxygen, and fuel combined to cause a catastrophic explo- sion. What is the unit bias here? Schedule! Get the job done ASAP! This narrow focus caused a blindness to the other real haz- ards, flammable gas mixture and an explo- sion. I call these risk blind spots.
Let’s do the analysis on the following ex- ample and ask yourself what process factors likely encouraged this worker to behave in this way and does leadership own some of the undesired outcomes? Can you identify any risk blind spots?
A client seriously injures one of his subcontractors when he jokingly shoots the subcontractor with a shop made com- pressed air tennis ball launcher while ad- vising him that all he will feel is a puff of air. At first glance, most would say this is horseplay, employee fault, and disciplinary action is justified. He is another bulletproof employee needing to be taught a lesson! Let’s take a step back and before jumping to this conclusion as the cause, let’s consider a couple of pertinent questions:
1. How is it that the employees have so much time on their hands to manufacture dangerous toys with company resources, and;
2. Where is the supervision?
By diving deep into these questions, you can start to see how a bulletproof employee is a byproduct of a leadership process. The employee unit bias, in this case, is making work fun.
Let’s consider this next one: A trained operator drills a hole in his respirator car- tridge just large enough to place a cigarette through and smoke it while working. The first reaction most of us experience is one of shock. How could this be? The second reaction is typically disciplinary action for this bulletproof employee. Let’s ask one revealing question before proceeding down the disciplinary action path: How is it that this employee came to the conclu- sion that it is okay to use his respirator cartridge as a cigarette holder? It turns out, in this employee’s culture, elders teach,
and the young learn. The work was being performed overseas within the employee’s homeland. Western leadership placed an early career employee in a leadership role over the elder as the respirator course in- structor. This action caused all of the elders in the class to tune out anything the early career employee had to say. Since the elders did not approve of the instructor, no one in the village did either. Needless to say that by refusing to learn, the elders missed the entire reason and purpose of wearing a respirator. This Western leadership process created bulletproof employees (the elders, the leaders of the village) because it did not consider the culture aspect and impact within the design of the program’s safety management system. The unit bias in this example is culture norms.
Our last example is about an employee who catapults face-first over and onto a concrete floor when the pallet jack he is pushing falls off the raised edge of truck’s tailgate. How did this happen? Traditional approaches say the employee failed to per- form his work safety and leave it at that as the cause of all causes. But, where is the job planning and who is overseeing this em- ployee’s work? The employee did not take into account the risk blind spot, in this case, the elevation difference, for a reason. The unit bias is moving the material from point “A” to point “B” to meet a schedule without regard to anything else.
Designing the process right the first time is the key. Once a process failure oc- curs, focus on the reason for the employee’s behavior and you will help bulletproof employees make the safety connection. Managing how you view the bulletproof employee while making an effort to un- derstand why they do what they do is the biggest obstacle in influencing their deci- sion-making process. Understanding the power of unit bias and the elimination of risk blind spots help convert bulletproof employees into engaged champions.
Incremental Rationalization
We all know the term, incremental ratio- nalization. We live it, experience it, and count on it. Bulletproof employees use in-
20 Occupational Health & Safety | JUNE 2017
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