Think of the safety journey as one of the vast improvements. When we first started managing safety, we did it by making and enforcing rules about safety and we got better, much better. Then we started to level out, we plateaued in our performance and needed to do something different. Safety got better and then it stopped improving. We were better but not excellent. And, we did not solve all of the underlying unidentified problems. The next step was our beginning to understand the safety by design, process safety ideas started to break our organizations out of the performance stagnation, and we got even better and safer. We could develop systems to not hurt workers. The design was an incredible tool, and we got even better. We now are at a place on this safety journey where more rules and more design do not equal more safety.
Organizations tend to improve quickly at first because there are many little things that can be fixed, monitored, or improved with little to no effort. These “high number of event and quickly improving companies” (the get-it-done crowd) tend to reinforce safety compliance, heighten workers attention with either strong positive or negative incentives, and increase management attention to safety.
Workers must be involved in problem identification
If you want to know how work is done, who should you ask? The answer is the worker.
Source: PRE-ACCIDENT INVESTIGATIONS, BETTER QUESTIONS – AN APPLIED APPROACH TO OPERATIONAL LEARNING, Conklin, 2016