Page 27 - Occupational Health & Safety, January/February 2019

You can make lots of mistakes that just cause wasted time, squan- dered money, or damaged customer relations, but it’s hard to get hurt if you’re not moving or things around you aren’t moving.
errors, and errors with customers (internal or external), all of which improve overall business performance. Reducing human error or stopping the chain reaction close to the beginning also costs nothing, unlike the massive effort or expenditure that can be involved at the other end of the chain.
The state-to-error pattern I have de- scribed is universal and (other than when you are learning something new) involved in every mistake you make or have ever made. This means that if we train individ- uals to self-trigger, we can quash reflexive rushing and improve everything. People won’t have to rush to make up time. And they won’t have to blame “production,” which is rarely the root cause, just the best excuse.
Larry Wilson is the founder and author of SafeStart and SafeStart Performance: training programs being used by workers in industry and high-performance sports, respectively.
or striking the wrong key . . . which means you have to make a correction or go get what you forgot. How many times, despite decades of practice, have you left the house to get into your car only to realize that you forgot something and now have to go back in to get it? We make these little mistakes all the time. Now you might be a bit frus- trated when that happens, but the trick is to recognize even that modicum of frustration. Recognition of this sort allows you to then ‘self-trigger’ and stop the dominoes falling right then and there. (See Figure 2: Univer- sal state to error pattern.)
This is the key point. The first two dom- inoes might have been hard to prevent fall- ing because you know how to do whatever
it is so well that complacency was almost
frustration or rushing those first two fallen dominoes are causing. If you don’t and then you start rushing in the car, now you have increased the risk of incident, which could include physical injury. You can make lots of mistakes that just cause wasted time, squandered money, or damaged customer relations, but it’s hard to get hurt if you’re not moving or things around you aren’t moving—the dynamic performance errors I mentioned above.
Learning how to self-trigger before the
third domino tumbles, to stop the chain re-
action of rushing, frustration, and fatigue,
is entirely doable—but it takes some train-
ing, which means you have to spend a bit
of time and effort to learn this skill. Once
you do, you prevent more than just injuries.
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You also prevent quality errors, production
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