Page 25 - Occupational Health & Safety, January/February 2019

Poor planning will cause you or other people to rush. But often the situation is a little more complex, and here is where our excuse-making talents come in.
Say a mechanic gets out to the job and real- izes that he or she has forgotten the right set of Allen keys. The line is down. Every- body’s waiting. Now the mechanic is going to run. And as he pelts around the corner to his shop, he slips and falls. Ask him why the rush, and he is going to say, you guessed it, “for production.” (And since it was forget- fulness that caused the delay, his supervi- sor might well have given him a look that encouraged him to rush.)
But here is the important thing: Pro- duction was blamed when in fact it was the state of mind of the mechanic that led to the fall.
The Self Area
Next time you find yourself rushing, ask yourself if it was really because of circum- stances beyond your control (a wreck on the highway that the satnav failed to flag) or another’s unexpected action. Or was it really because you are trying to make up time because of a simple performance error you made. (See Figure 1: Sources of unex- pected events.)
If you’re like most people (over 80 per- cent, in fact) the reason you are rushing is not because of the other guy or the envi- ronment/conditions. Over 90 percent of the time, the reason you are rushing lies in what we can call the “self area.” In this self area there are only two main reasons for rushing: poor planning or, more often than not, trying to make up time because of a simple performance error you made.
I was chatting once to one of our con- sultants, Joe (who used to be a residential construction supervisor), about an inci- dent one morning that illustrates this point neatly. A basement had been dug out and a cement truck was pulling up when my colleague realized that he had forgotten the 90-degree elbow needed to connect the drainpipes. The big boss was also coming to the site later in the day.
“How fast did you drive back to the store to get it?” I asked.
Figure 1
“I got clocked at 85 mph on a city street by a policeman, but I told him what had just happened and that my superintendent was coming by at lunch to see how things were going. He let me off without a ticket but told me, ‘Okay, but you can’t drive this fast in the city, you could kill somebody.’”
When a company has a turn- around or shutdown, does anybody ever plan extra time for performance errors?
So when a company has a turnaround or shutdown, does anybody ever plan extra time for performance errors? Do you hear of firms putting in an extra 10 or 20 percent for screw-ups? Not the kind of thing that lands you a lot of contracts, even though the average human being makes more than 50 mistakes a day. (I’ve made about 15 or 16 already just typing this out. How many times do you have to hit the backspace bar when you type? I know, it’s no big deal: We all do it. There is usually no problem with typos or punctuation slips if you’re just
sending an internal email. But if you mis- spell a client’s name and then it is published in a magazine, you can look like you didn’t pass elementary school. I’ve had articles published where the sentence did not con- tain a verb or noun. Not the kind of thing that makes a reader think your brilliant. Did you catch the last typo? It was put there on purpose).
So, as it turns out, over 90 percent of the times most people rush, it’s because they were trying to make up time caused by a simple performance error, such as forgetting a phone or not bringing a pass- port. These “static” performance errors can lead to “dynamic” performance errors where you are moving and there is poten- tial or great potential for injury, severe in- jury, or a fatality. Remember Joe going to retrieve his 90-degree elbow? He doesn’t normally drive 85 mph through the city. He was doing it so his performance error wouldn’t slow or stop production. When people rush, they make more mistakes than normal. If they are really rushing, they make lots of mistakes. Have you ever
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