A title should grab your attention.
Victor Roggeveen's "Safety? Risk reduction is as far as we go" (Prebes Safety News 213) did in any case.
Does Roggeveen really have such a gloomy outlook? Will prevention advisers get no further than some paper risk reduction and will safety remain a utopia?
We summarise his article for you because we agree with it completely. You can read why in this blog.
Safety does not exist
There is no definition of "safety" other than the absence of its opposite: danger/risk/damage/injury. A term with a negative connotation.
If we want to know the state of safety in a company, we in fact measure the opposite: the incidents, the near-accidents and the risks.
Also because risks can never be completely eliminated, total safety does not exist. Furthermore, a very uncertain factor, coincidence, plays a role in the measurement results. So counting accidents does not provide a reliable measurement of safety.
So we cannot measure safety?
Roggeveen argues that in order to know the safety level of organisations and thus to improve it, you must not focus on those possible accidental consequences, but on the period before.
Just before the incident occurs
In this period, of course, there are already risks. Without the coincidence factor, you focus on the stability of the primary process (e.g. production or service provision).
If you manage to identify the risks threatening the primary process and combat them efficiently, you work on a safer process.
Of course we at Seekurico do not think that occupational accidents or near-incidents should not be a starting point. They offer very interesting learning material. In our opinion it is a and-and story.
Risk: dotting the i's and crossing the t's
During an incident, energy is released in an uncontrolled manner and at an uncontrolled time as a result of all kinds of factors - sometimes inherent in the system. Roggeveen labels these - sometimes unknown but usually complex - possibilities where energy is suddenly released as "risks".
That people do stupid things and are therefore ultimately the cause of incidents, is therefore too short-sighted. According to Dekkers, Cilliers and Hofmeyr (2011), risks are "the unforeseen effects of the failure of a multitude of interconnections in a system devised by (fallible) people". Something we fully agree with.
That is why we are alert to these 3 elements:
1. the amount of energy that can cause damage
2. the chance that this energy can be released in an uncontrolled way
3. the chance that people/objects are exposed to that energy
When these 3 factors come together, you have a recipe for disaster and possibly an incident with disastrous consequences. And these 3 factors are present in all business processes, whether they be transport, storage, material processing or others.
Trying to prevent the uncontrolled release of that energy is possible.
We know this as the risk reduction cycle. The better you control the five phases of that cycle, the less risk and thus the safer you make the process.
We know this as the risk reduction cycle. The better you control the five phases of that cycle, the less risk and thus the safer you make the process.
"Mother of all risks”
This is how Roggeveen calls the primary process. And he is right. That is why prevention advisers and companies invest a considerable amount of time in risk inventory and evaluation (RI&E) in order to control as many risks as possible from the outset.
That in itself does not promote safety is an open door. Something that some in our sector sadly fail to do.
We work with our clients to find out how they can feasibly and efficiently reduce as many business risks as possible, not only at the start but in every step of the primary process. For, but especially with their employees.
Initiative is everything
The risk reduction process is not rocket science because it is logical. However, because it is mostly daily business for those who work in prevention and occupational safety, we will briefly show the 5 steps here. Some of these steps stand or fall with initiative.
And in our opinion, there is still a lot of room for growth there. Seekurico is already strongly committed to the involvement and ownership of employees at every level of a company. We see that this works and will therefore continue to facilitate and encourage participation at every stage and level in the future.
Kennen, kunnen, willen, durven en doen
Spoiler: in the first three phases, it usually works and sometimes even works well. Often, the real security risk is not (anymore) in knowing, being able to or even wanting to.
Most of the time. Often. Not always.
Risicoreductie model Roggeveen (Source: Veiligheidsnieuws 213, Prebes)
1) Knowing: recognising, understanding and grasping the risk
Where there has been a thorough and complete RI&E of the current situation, people are aware of the dangers to which they are exposed. This is called situational awareness and it provides the necessary sense of urgency, the foundation for all safety-promoting initiatives.
People would not be people if, even in this phase, they sometimes have other ideas. Well-intentioned even, because they then say they are doing 'better'. This phenomenon has a name: WAIWAD or Work As Imagined vs. Work as Actually Done. (Lundberg, Rollenhagen and Hollnagel, 2009)
2) can: be able to intervene, know how to reduce the risk
This requires that enough people have the qualities and capabilities to intervene. There are two ways of doing this: reducing the severity of the risk or reducing exposure to it.
3) want to: be sufficiently motivated to act
This is no longer so easy or at least less obvious in many companies, but usually the will is there. Companies stimulate this, for instance, by working with so-called Life Saving Rules. Shell, for instance, saw its number of fatal accidents fall by 70% in three years.
People who want to do so, comply with these rules mainly because they believe in them and not because they are imposed on them. Fortunately, this intrinsic motivation is present in many people.
4) Daring: daring to give safety priority over the primary process
In this phase, someone weighs up the advantage against the disadvantage. And whether he/she is the right person to reduce the risk in question at the expense of disrupting production. Roggeveen rightly states that external factors determine courage more than willingness alone.
Here, risk reduction becomes less obvious. Daring here comes up against personal boundaries, namely having the courage to put the uncertain collective safety risk ahead of personal certainties such as prestige and career.
What ultimately makes the difference is strongly linked to how someone expects the organisation to react. That reaction is related to the company culture and the values it shares.
For Seekurico, it is therefore a matter of finding or creating openness in the corporate culture. And also why behaviour on the shop floor is influenced by the attitude of management.
Of course, a traumatic experience of one's own or a recent accident at work of a colleague also influences the decision. Also positive. Whoever takes the initiative, is often supported afterwards.
5) do: take action to reduce the risk
Positive output in phase 4 means that, in phase 5, one takes action.
A precarious point, it often turns out. In many cases, the reporter is dependent on help from the organisation. Does the reporter succeed in communicating the sense of urgency to colleagues or managers who are not yet equally convinced of the seriousness of the risk?
If the latter do not (yet) perceive a threat, it will be extra difficult to get them to take risk-reducing measures. If they are both risk takers and risk runners, this goes a lot faster. Examples are pilots and employees in the offshore industry.
What’s in a/our name?
In Esperanto, sekureco means "safety". Since its inception, "Seekurico" has been daily Seeking to cure your risk. But perhaps even more than in the beginning, we realise the scope of our baseline.
Seeking, because we are trying and actively searching for it. For the unexploited opportunities and pitfalls in each of those 5 phases.
Cure, because we are always working on getting better, even when healing still seems far away. Or perhaps impossible. Here too, we remain honest. Risks can never be 100% excluded because of the factors of chance and human input.
That is why we sometimes dare to push the envelope in order to encourage that initiative and that courage. From the very first tour, we speak to people. Their own ideas about safety are worth their weight in gold. Their comments are safe with us because they only serve to reduce everyone's risk.
We sometimes see blatantly unsafe situations, but blaming or dryly recording them does not get us anywhere. The dialogue is our source of information, the starting point and a recurring item when we support a company that wants to take its safety policy to a higher level.
The Co at the end is more than ever our anchor point: for Companies, but especially co- as in together: we with and for every stakeholder in that company, so really from top to bottom in the company.
If you wonder how we see this in practice, we would be happy to come and meet you. Preferably in person, but we can also do it digitally. You tell us your question or simply take us on a tour of your company or institution. Whether it is an SME or a multinational, whether you are in the logistics, industry or cultural sector, makes no difference. From the very first moment, we are looking together for the risks and how everyone can and dares to tackle them.
