The Safety of Work

We dive into the final chapters of the book and analyze Hollnagel’s intent and offer our commentary on his ideas. Though our ideas don’t necessarily jibe with all of Hollnagel’s, we appreciate our time dissecting this seminal book. Tune in to hear our thoughts on the final four chapters. Make sure to let us know if you also read the book and your thoughts on the content.We hope you enjoyed our little end-of-year deep-dive. Have a happy and healthy New Year! Topics:A recap of the chapters we’ve covered thus far.Chapter 6Dealing with complexity,The role of resilience.Chapter 7Correct and incorrect functions.Determining the cause of accidents in complex systems.The faulty definition of Safety II.The purpose of Safety II.Chapter 8Recognizing, monitoring, and controlling performance variability. Why Hollnagel criticizes Safety I.Methods and techniques.Chapter 9Hollnagel’s predictions about the creation of Safety III.Practical takeaways from the book.Quotes:“So you think of Safety I just as it protects against lots of specific things, but it doesn’t protect against generic things that we haven’t specifically protected against.”“The fact is...we can make some fairly reliable and valid conclusions about what happened leading up to something going wrong.”“I think all theorists we should take seriously and not literally.” Resources:Safety I and Safety II: The Past and Future of Safety ManagementFeedback@safetyofwork.com 

Picking up where we left off, we begin our discussion with chapter three. Over the course of this episode, we talk about Hollnagel’s definition of Safety I, the myths of safety, and causality (among other things). Tune in for part two of our in-depth look at this important book. Topics:Chapter 3.Habituation.Preoccupation with failure.Work as imagined vs. work as actually performed.A definition of Safety I.Chapter 4.The four myths of Safety I.Causality.Misinterpreting Heinrich.Human error.Chapter 5.Deconstruction.Linear and non-linear systems.Cause and effect.General takeaways from chapters 3-5. Quotes:“...I think this one particular idea of work as imagined/work as done has been thought about a lot in the time since this book was published…”“What is this measure of successful work? What is this way that we would categorize something as successful, if it’s not, not having accidents?”“It’s a misinterpretation of Heinrich to apply the ratios.”“And that sort of criticism of the old to explain the new, I think is never as firm a foundation as clearly explaining what you’re sort of underlying ideas and principles are and then building on top of them.” Resources:Safety I and Safety II: The Past and Future of Safety ManagementFeedback@safetyofwork.com

For this episode, we are breaking away from the standard formula for this show. We thought it best to split this topic into three episodes, as we don’t want to oversimplify our breakdown of this seminal, two-hundred page book. We encourage all of our listeners to follow along and read the book with us. Join us as we dig into this influential book by Erik Hollnagel. Topics:Interpretations of new theories.Hollnagel being the direct intellectual descendant of Professor Rasmussen.Chapter 1: The Issues.The denominator problem.The regulator paradox.The problems with defining safety.Overall thoughts on Chapter 1.What to skim and what to read closely. Quotes:“Most theories are billed as critiques of other theories. So, any new theory implicitly, and usually, explicitly criticizes a lot of existing stuff. And it’s important to separate those two things out.”“He says that success and failure are not opposites.”“It means that every single data point, then, has a lot of uncertainty attached around to it, because they’re such isolated examples, such extraordinary events…” Resources:Safety I and Safety II: The Past and Future of Safety ManagementFeedback@safetyofwork.com

Ultimately, we want to help everyone understand the role of organizations and individuals when it comes to safety regulation.  Topics:Why regulators are often spoken of negatively.The two forms of deregulation.Goal-based and rule-based frameworks.The progressive pulling-back of Government involvement in safety.Why overregulation occurs.What is actually being regulated.Conclusions from our conversation. Quotes:“So, the intention of this goal-based regulatory strategy is for organizations to understand their broad obligations to adopt a risk-based management strategy and to set their own safety management requirements inside their own organization.”“The second theme that came out of the analysis was that overregulation is because of liability management and management insecurity.”“The next important question to ask is are we regulating safety work or regulating safety of work?” Resources:Seeing Like a StateHow Deregulation can Become OverregulationFeedback@safetyofwork.com

The paper we use to frame our discussion is one that has been making the rounds on social media recently. We thought it was important to seize on the opportunity to discuss a work safety issue while it’s top of mind for the public. Topics:What it means when something isn’t peer-reviewed.Why statistics are ever popular.How many workers hours to decimal places.Using a model that weighs underlying variables and randomness.How this study is another nail in the coffin for this question.Practical takeaways. Quotes:“I’ve noticed in Australia, at least, there’s an increasing move to have safety statistics included in annual reports, at least for publicly traded companies.”“And their conclusion was: Almost all of it was explained by randomness.”“If recordable injury rates are used to record performance, then we’re actually rewarding random variation.” Resources:The Statistical Invalidity of TRIR as a Measure of Safety PerformanceFeedback@safetyofwork.com

We dig into how safety promotion is used and its effectiveness within an organization. Often, safety communication is about large-scale behaviors and societal problems. So, we found a paper that focused on workplace safety, which was hard to find. The Effects of an Informational Safety Campaign in the Shipbuilding Industry helps us frame our conversation about the efficacy of safety communication and injury reduction. Tune in to join the conversation! Topics:What we mean by “safety communication campaigns”.Surveying the efficacy of communication campaigns.‘70s-era seat belt campaigns.‘80s-era home safety campaigns.The conclusions from the communication campaign studies.What makes a communication campaign successful.Why the best safety research is often outside the workplace.Message retention rates.Practical takeaways. Quotes:“It doesn’t have to be a poster, it could be broadcast communications, video clips, stuff on a website, even a podcast. But it’s a verbal or written message from the organization…” “Most of this research is conducted on very large scale behaviors, which are things that people generally agree are bad behaviors. So, many of the campaigns that are most effective and are being studied are to do with things like drink driving or cigarette smoking.”“There could well be some more diffuse, more long-term effect here on the climate that our measurements just aren’t capturing…” Resources:The Effects of an Informational Safety Campaign in the Shipbuilding Industry. Feedback@safetyofwork.com

Given that the last two episodes were about theories, we wanted to get back to something more concrete in nature. Hence, the topic of parachutes. We find they are often used in military operations, but are rarely required for civilian aviation. Let’s look at this discrepancy and discuss whether parachutes are actually used to prevent injury or death.Join us for this interesting and somewhat surprising discussion. Topics:Are parachutes for life-risking activities or a life-saving tool?Measuring the usefulness of parachutes.The arguments against evidence-based medicine.When and why you only need a small sample size.Why it’s hard to design an experiment to translate to real-world results.Why we need more experiments on events with direct causal mechanisms.Practical takeaways. Quotes:“...They hide a few key considerations. One of the big ones is, that it’s not really a choice between at the point you have to jump out of a plane, whether to wear a parachute or not; it’s things like, do we make laws that all planes should carry parachutes just in case?”“So it’s not just that more research is needed, it’s that more research is almost guaranteed to reverse the result of this bad study.”“Very often, when it’s come to the practicality of how do we investigate this within an organization, we’ve decided that an experiment is not the best use of our time and resources.” Resources:Parachute Use to Prevent Death and Major Trauma Related to Gravitational ChallengeDoes Usage of a Parachute in Contrast to Free Fall Prevent Major Trauma?Parachute Use to Prevent Death and Major Trauma When Jumping From AircraftFeedback@safetyofwork.com

We frame our conversation around the paper, Safety Climate and Injuries: An Examination of Theoretical and Empirical Relationships. Tune in to hear us talk about retrospective studies, the perception of safety vs. actual safety, and the influence of injuries on safety climate. Topics:Retrospective studies.Organizational and psychological safety climates.Perception of safety and actual safety.Designing research to answer your question.Influence of injuries on safety climate.Contamination.Practical takeaways Quotes:“People who say that they think their company cares about safety, those people generally are safer.”“Most safety climate research assumes that safety climate is a good measure, because it is a predictor of injuries.” “Not enough of these studies measure the strength of climate.” Resources:Safety Climate and Injuries: An Examination of Theoretical and Empirical RelationshipsFeedback@safetyofwork.com

Dr. Neale is a Senior Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute at Deakin University. There, he studies human geography and cultural anthropology. We use his paper, Fuzzy Boundaries: Simulation and Expertise in Bush Fire Management, to help frame our discussion. Tune in to hear our insights about the safety community and Dr. Neale’s thoughts on bush fire management. Topics:Dr. Neale’s PhD thesis.How he gained access to the F-band community.The tension between people in front-line occupations and safety professionals.Improvising and standardizing.The tension between individuals and bureaucracy.How to be an effective communicator.What happens after a big fire season.Becoming a fire behavior analyst. Quotes:“When you’re interacting with somebody, what is your expertise based in?”“There’s no one way of doing it right and any attempt to wrangle these people, these professionals into being all one type of person, they will resist it.”“The theme that expresses itself in a particular part of people’s work, expresses itself in many other parts of their work; it’s not a contained problem…” Resources:Fuzzy Boundaries: Simulation and Expertise in Bush Fire ManagementFeedback@safetyofwork.com

The podcast discusses the struggle to define successful safety practices, the importance of risk assessment, and the impact of certain safety rules. They explore the roles of PhD candidates and supervisors, the importance of peer review, and the lack of evidence in safety work. The concept of different types of safety work is also discussed, as well as the relationship between industrial manslaughter laws and safety in organizations.