We must battle the need to believe that when a worker has some type of bad outcome, that adverse outcome happens because the worker became
momentarily incompetent. Our thinking is driven by a bias toward bad things happening because someone did something bad. The bias that worker became stupid is really a strong force in how we learn from events. Thinking that the worker is stupid sends you down the wrong road for operational discovery. If the worker was doing an excellent job on Tuesday, what changed so drastically so that this good worker now becomes a stupid worker on Wednesday? If the employee was meeting production goals, behaving helpful to other people, and not being injured was that worker stupid before the event happened? When we call workers stupid are we not just pushing blame away from ourselves and from the organization we represent.
We tend to treat workers after a mishap happens as if the workers have become defective. That belief that the worker is bad or defective must be the origin of the phrase: “You can’t fix stupid.” It also implies that you were dumb enough to hire an idiot. Either that or managers and safety people are mean, evil, and lazy. You and I know better.
Source: PRE-ACCIDENT INVESTIGATIONS, BETTER QUESTIONS – AN APPLIED APPROACH TO OPERATIONAL LEARNING, Todd Conklin, PhD., 2016
