No reindeers were harmed: a true story of ‘Zero Harm’

Do you believe in Zero Harm? Is that your goal for avoiding injuries and ensuring safety of your people? Is that an expectation imposed upon your organisation?

Here is a true story and an attempt to challenge the Zero Harm ideology prevalent in almost all safety critical industries. 

Earlier this year, I interviewed a seafarer whose brother went missing at sea. We don’t know under what circumstances Captain Mathew (name anonymised) went missing or, if you like, what was the cause of this accident. Unfortunately, the sea does not provide many answers but this painful story, told from his brother’s perspective who also happens to be a seafarer, reveals the dark side of the Zero Harm ideology. There’s a lot of debates and discussions in the risk and safety industry whether Zero should be a goal or not. There are practitioners, academics and researchers who believe that there is nothing wrong with having Zero as an aspiration. I hope that this story will serve to slow people down and think about how a seemingly aspiring goal translates into practice in global shipping. I call it a true story but it is shaped by my biased and subjective views. True only to the extent that some may find resonance with this story while others find it deeply uncomfortable.

This story touches upon several themes:

• The unintended effects of absolute and binary goals

• Why perfection (Zero) cannot be a goal to motivate fallible humans.

• Why compassion, empathy, listening and understanding cannot coexist with absolute and binary goals?

• Why safety inspections, audits and investigations are so far from an objective exercise?

And finally, the entire culture of the risk and safety industry is based on the idea of harm aversion. The power of this story lies in understanding how the ideology of harm aversion translate into practice. 

More specifically, absolute goals such as Zero Harm lead to more harm in a risk-averse society. 

This story was first published in the book, 51 stories in Culture, co-authored by Dr Nippin Anand and Dr Robert Long. Link to the book: https://novellus.solutions/product/51-stories-in-culture-to-live-and-to-be/