“WORKER REMINDED TO PAY MORE ATTENTION IN THE FUTURE…”
It’s such a classic problem within safety right? People just can’t seem to be able to pay enough attention. This must be the case based on the number of incident reports I have seen that simply recommend- “worker reminded to pay more attention in the future”. If only we could find a magic “attention” button and switch it on. If only we could be more mindful…
WHAT WAS THAT? I WASN’T PAYING ATTENTION…
The reality of course is that people are fallible, and are subject to fatigue and distraction, and pressure, misdirection, and well, a lot of things that are usually not what we are directly trying to do. Plus there are a bunch of inbuilt ad automatic biases that allow us to be great at being human, but not great at “paying attention” to everything all the time. It’s just not possible, and if you do even start thinking you are really good at paying attention, just go to a magic show and that should shatter your confidence.
CAN AN ORGANISATION BE MINDFUL?
Well, this has been the subject of a few different angles of attack, but in essence there are many who believe that organisations can adopt behaviours (which really means the people within them do it of course) that lead to a more mindful, and therefore safer, business. That is, the organisation can act in a way that is similar to a person “paying attention”.
SO WHAT DOES A MINDFUL ORGANISATION DO?
Weick and Sutcliffe, in their book “Managing the Unexpected”, say that a mindful organisation is a reliable one. In fact, they talk about being a High Reliability Organisation (HRO) as the way to manage the unexpected, and by looking at the five criteria they say HRO’s share, you can see how this relates to the idea of a mindful organisation. The five criteria are a:
- Preoccupation with failure;
- Reluctance to simplify;
- Sensitivity to operations;
- Commitment to resilience; and
- Deference to expertise.
PREOCCUPATION WITH FAILURE
This isn’t pessimism, this is about treating lapses and minor breakdowns as symptoms of something being wrong. Some others describe it as “entertaining doubt”, where the leaders of the business don’t treat a period without incidents as a sign that everything is fine, but rather may in fact be more concerned at times like this because they are not sure where to look. History is littered with incidents that, in hindsight, had plenty of warning signs just crying out for someone to notice them.
RELUCTANCE TO SIMPLIFY
I think that this criteria most often applies to the way we try and understand why things go wrong, and importantly why things go right. To attribute the successful completion of a project to “hard work” or “common sense”, or something else as meaningless, is easy, but takes away from the real underlying success factors, and therefore makes it harder to replicate, and of course diagnose when things go wrong
SENSITIVITY TO OPERATIONS
This means paying more attention within the organisation to where the work is being done. By maintaining a close link with what the organisation fundamentally does, with the “coal face”, the business can detect problems early. Importantly, this really means remaining sensitive to the people at the coal face, not just the production figures.
COMMITMENT TO RESILIENCE
HRO’s know that the systems they use, and the people that use them, are fallible. Resilience is about recovery from errors and breakdowns. It takes a mindful organisation to understand that they will have mishaps and lapses, and to try and build in the ability to recover, to ensure that when an error occurs it doesn’t break the business.
DEFERENCE TO EXPERTISE
Within a HRO, difference and diversity is cultivated, and importantly expertise is identified and then used. You don’t hear “I know best” in a mindful business. Decision making is done where the expertise is, which is often at the front line. Hubris (overconfidence) is a dangerous thing in an orgainsation.
“COMPANY REMINDED TO PAY MORE ATTENTION IN THE FUTURE”
Almost ironically, being a mindful organisation, takes a fair bit of attention, but the difference here is that it is deliberate attention applied in a meaningful way. It’s not the type of attention a spotter needs after standing in the sun for an hour.
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING MINDFUL
Mindful organisations don’t run at 100% perfection, and the point is that they know this because they know that people and systems are fallible. Instead, they treat mishaps as signals, they resist simplistic explanations, they are connected with their operations, they seek to recover from errors rather than being derailed by them, and decision making gets done by those with the most expertise (which doesn’t always mean the most senior or experienced).
It’s probably not easy being a mindful organisation, but that’s the point. If safety was easy, someone else would have found a solution before now, and I wouldn’t be writing this article in the first place.
DAVE WHITEFIELF
Director, PeoPle & risk
“history is littered with incidents that, in hindsight, had plenty of warning signs just crying out for someone to notice them.”
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