Saturday, July 06, 2024
The difference between priorities and core principles has been discussed recently, and I would like us all to keep that in mind until it becomes a reality in our thoughts and decisions regarding safety at work. Whenever a near miss, accident, or injury occurs, we investigate it and find the root cause so that we can learn from it and avoid it in the future. Recently, I reviewed all the incidents from the past couple of years and found that each one could be broken down into one of four root causes... A lack of time, overconfidence, ignorance, or convenience. This seems to be the main reason we place a lower priority on following procedure, knowing policy, or being safe. We can sometimes find it inconvenient to turn off the power, we may not have time for a good JHA briefing, we might not want to read up on the procedure or the policy, or we might just think that because we are so good we can do it safely without following the procedure or policy. These are real and frequent thoughts in our minds and the things we base our priority decisions on. At work, we need to shift our paradigm and make safety a core principle. Every minute of every day, there are many things that can go wrong in our very hazardous industry. By developing procedures and policies, we have mitigated those hazards, we have developed training processes to help us be aware of them, and we have established procedures to reduce the risk of injury. It's all pointless if we don't make learning, knowing, looking them up, and following them a core value of daily life from the moment we walk onto the job site to the moment we return home to our loved ones. As I was doing this review, I came up with something that might help us stay focused. There are four root causes: Convenience, Overconfidence, Ignorance and No Time...the first letters spell COIN. Let's replace those with four other things...Best Practices Always Focused No Short Cuts Knowledge is Power BANK In other words.... No more COIN, only BANK.
Comments