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Ep.80 What is safety clutter?
The Safety of Work
Reversing the Burden of Proof in Safety Management
The speakers discuss the concept of reversing the burden of proof in safety management, suggesting that questioning the value of existing practices and having the same level of proof requirement for new initiatives and stopping existing practices could reduce safety clutter.
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Speaker 2
All right, Drew. So now that there's a lot of management teams not getting their safety reports anymore, we're going to number four. So reversing this burden of proof, I think you sort of conceptualize this one, Drew, in that we don't really need to prove that what we're going to put into an organization works for safety. It could just be any old idea that we we can come up with or that we've seen in another business or that we think might do something. But when we try to take something away, because of some of these moral and legal perceived aspects to prove that we should stop doing something. So, okay, we're now not going to do a toolbox talk every day to try to remove something or to try to significantly change something like that requires so much time and organizational effort and proof to try to get it done. So one piece of advice is have the same level of proof requirement when you're putting a new thing into your business. This is this idea of, you know, to fix Clutter, we've also got to stop the bucket being filled up again every time. So we want to stop things going into the bucket as well as try to empty the bucket a little bit as well. So if you're going to have an approach in your organization where every time there's an incident recommendation or an audit recommendation or a safety plan or a committee action, actually having a burden of proof on the initiator of that action demonstrating the contribution and the confidence and the consensus that that activity is going to add value or it's not going to get done would be a great starting point to not make the problem any
Speaker 1
worse. David, I think we need to really strategically pick our battles here because there are sometimes this fight I think is easier than others. If you've got a workplace health and safety inspector who is giving you an improvement notice, that's kind of a hard time to push back and say where's the evidence that this is going to help. Where you need to pass an FSC audit and the auditor is digging you for not having a document. Trying to ask them for proof that you need that document other than because the audit says so is going to be hard. But our internal investigation reports, I think the kind of spot where this should be easy. We look at the recommendations and we just push back and say where is the evidence that implementing this recommendation is going to do positive good for safety in our organization rather than harm by adding clutter. Because those are things we voluntarily take on ourselves when we accept recommendations. And the audit improvement notices those aren't voluntary, those are sometimes pushed on us. We can look for all those times when we voluntarily add stuff ourselves and be strict about enforcing you. Where is the evidence that this is worth doing?
Speaker 2
Yeah, true.
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