The delusion of controlling risk

Overloaded trucks with men, burnt switchboards, lone workers at height without a fall protection.

The first thing that comes to mind is – oh my god, are these people going to kill themselves?

If this is your first reaction, you are not a risk manager or a safety leader, you are a safety priest.

Is risk foremost a matter of perception and culture or control and mitigation?
I use the term foremost with deliberation. If you start on the wrong note, you will remain trapped in the delusion of control forever.

Watch the language of risk and safety: controls, critical controls, hierarchy of controls, risk elimination, risk metrics, risk mitigation and risk ranking.

Much of this language becomes useless the moment we step into another culture.
Why? Because others don’t feel and therefore don’t speak about the risk. They don’t even see the risk. That’s a problem with perception, not controls.

If your incident reporting patterns reveal:
a. experienced people getting injured;
b. Incidents are happening in familiar environment and during routine work;
c. Incidents are happening despite comprehensive checks and processes;

These are not signs of failure of control. It reveals that people have become desensitised to the risks as well as the process controls. And if it excites you too much, you have become distanced from their realities.

Instead of tightening the controls further or segregating between critical and non-critical in your own mind, help your people become sensitised to the risk.

For instance, during the toolbox discussion, get the newest and the youngest people to kick-off the meeting and ask questions. Encourage the old and experienced people not to instruct but to engage with the young minds and clarify their doubts. It’s a powerful way to sensitise the experts and at the same time getting the young minds to learn from those experts. You have just turned a ritual of power and control (where one person talks and 10 would nod) into a meaningful  exercise of experience exchange.

There’s nothing wrong with the language of controls except that we cannot control what others do not even see.

It seems like a simple and obvious problem, but it is not. Sometimes we have to travel far from our own culture to understand simple things.