Page 16 - Occupational Health & Safety, June 2018

RISK MANAGEMENT
While the outcome of an assumption can be inconsequential, for example, being wrong or right about the outcome of a coin toss, the opposite is also true. Your assump- tions can convert an otherwise successful approach into a complete disaster. In this case, that bear could have attacked without much effort and without much resistance. Lucky for these two workers, the lessons learned did not require the cost of a life. Always remember: Assumptions are the foundation of blindness and are a precursor to the inevitability of undesirable outcomes.
Blindness as I am referring to here is self-inflicted. By dismissing something as irrelevant or by not considering all of the possible outcomes of actions or inactions, you limit vision and enhance blindness. The result is that expectations are often not met, or the result leads to undesirable consequences.
Assumption-Based Decision Model
Let’s take a look at how most business decisions are made by most leaders at all levels through the use of the Assumption- Based Decision Model. This tool considers risk and basis of decisions to determine if there is an imbalance within an organiza- tion that results in blindness towards un- expected results.
The model balances decisions on the pivot point where vision and expected results join forces to deliver operational excellence. Any imbalance in the model causes blindness and unexpected results.
Most decision-based models include the standard legal, social, and financial considerations as they pertain to organi- zational risk. I will not elaborate on these three factors because most professionals understand the implications of each and their impact on the business. These appear on the right side of the model.
On the left side of the pivot point is risk tolerance. Every organization has a predetermined risk tolerance and each establishes it, not necessarily by policy or documentation, but rather by their visible actions. Often, risk tolerance is expressed in ways that are invisible to leadership but very visible to the workforce and vice versa. High-risk tolerance is, in fact, a storage warehouse for blindness, one that elimi- nates possible outcomes by the assump- tions that limit vision. An example of this is when a leader says safety is important but
then proceeds to walk past a “safety shoe required area” without this protection. An- other example is when a worker correctly uses personal protective equipment only when the boss is around.
Sometimes, it manifests itself in other ways, such as in a culture where someone else is often responsible for taking action; therefore, there is little to no accountability established. In these examples, the leader and the worker are expressing a high-risk tolerance at the expense of legal, social, and financial factors and are tipping the Assumption-Based Decision Model to the left, toward blindness. On the other hand, when risk tolerance is very low, it immo- bilizes the organization to the point where work cannot be accomplished. In this case, the model is tipped to the right and the same result occurs, blindness.
Balancing risk tolerance with the three most common decision drivers establish- es a higher likelihood of success in regard to experiencing the expected organiza- tional results.
As you can see, assumptions are a pow- erful factor in establishing clarity of vision or the darkness of blindness. Comprehen- sive and vetted assumptions are the first step toward driving the desired results.
This means that assumptions can be your friend or foe. The key to success in this regard is to understand the basis for your decision-making process and the risks as- sociated with it.
Vision vs. Blindness
Vision and blindness are often not mutu- ally exclusive. One can be completely con- trary to the other and complementary the same time.
Let’s look at the polar opposite relation- ship of vision and blindness. If you have no vision, then you have blindness. Con- versely, if you have no blindness, then you have vision.
When vision and blindness have a po- lar opposite relationship, we tend to make unconscious assumptions, which leads to unconscious bias, which leads to unmiti- gated risk. An example of an unconscious assumption is when we leave our homes for work every morning. We inherently make the unconscious assumption that we will arrive safely and on time. We blind ourselves to the fact that how we drive and the condition of our vehicle could signifi- cantly impact that end result. We even as- sume our vehicles will start and the tires will not go flat and the brakes will work and everyone will stop at that red light or stop sign. Most often, few of these are con- siderations when we leave for work. We transform these into viable assumptions that blind us to the point of perhaps tak- ing an unmitigated risk.
From a purist perspective, vision and blindness do have a polar opposite relation- ship. In reality, though, both usually coex- ist in harmony. Vision and blindness can share a complementary relationship when
16 Occupational Health & Safety | JUNE 2018
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