Phil La Duke is Full Of @#$%
Great read by Phil LaDuke reflecting honestly and self critically on the last decade of his career and how his various epiphanies have determined his current values. Whether you agree with the title of the article or not it is damn hard to argue with its content! Read the whole article here.
A few extracts:
Too often safety pundits keep parading out the same old tired schlock in a marginally different package. Not me; I’d like to think that I’ve grown over the last decade and a half (my waist-line sure suggests it) and so here is my attempt to tear down all I’ve said on the subject and start anew………..
The Values of A Safety Culture
In my original speech, some years ago I prattled on about the values of a safety culture; I was an ass. The term “safety culture” is a misnomer. At best safety could be a subculture, but it is not—in even the broadest sense of the term—a culture. A culture is the codified set of shared values, rituals, rules, and taboos of a population………
Value One: All Injuries Are Preventable
I’ve written several times on the hypocrisy and condescension of slogans like “Safety Is Our Number One Priority” and “Safety First”. Such platitudes are disingenuous and the people who perpetuate them are either liars or fools or both. For some reading this, this is fairly obvious, while others will furrow their sub-simian brows and hammer out an angry email filled with mouth-breathing outrage. So why revisit it? I am continually surprised at the shear volume of safety professionals who continue to self-righteously lie about this to his or her constituency………
Value 2: Compliance is Not Enough
Compliance is a poor measure of workplace safety. Nobody was ever saved by compliance, but a company that doesn’t value compliance as part of an overall safety strategy is unlikely to be successful. The idea that “okay is good enough” or that the bare minimum as defined by a third party that doesn’t understand fact one about your business, your operating climate, and your work constraints is a pretty good indicator that your organization’s leadership has its head stuffed in an orifice that would make a master yogi green with envy.
Value 3: Prevention is more effective than correction
This value is beginning to seem trite to me. If someone were to come up to me and say, “We’re world-class because we believe that prevention is more effective than correction” I might not laugh in his or her face, but I would almost certainly roll my eyes and make fun of them behind their backs.
Value 4: Safety is everybody’s job
The fact that I every preached this dribble is embarrassing beyond words, but I’ll go on for another couple of paragraphs anyway. Safety isn’t everyone’s job, well at least not the way that people think. It’s nice to say while you polish the seats of cheaply made office chairs with your ass and think of what a swell job you would have if those idiots out in the field, or on the shop floor, or wherever their jobs take them would just step up to safety and stop hurting themselves.
Value 5: Safety is a strategic business element
I believe this value more now than I did when I first wrote it. People get to wound up in the emotional side of safety. Yes injuries are tragic, yes it leaves people horribly maimed and scarred and yes, it creates widows and orphans. Stating the obvious doesn’t really do anyone any good. And telling people “safety is the right thing to do” is condescending and insulting. In saying it we are implying that but for the intercession and wise advice we would turn the workplace into a site of such carnage that it would leave Pol Pot sleeping with the light on for the next decade.
Value 6: Safety is owned by operations
It’s heartening to know that I wasn’t completely wrong about everything. Safety absolutely has to be owned by those with the greatest control and clout in an organization and that is Operations. Operations, for lack of a better definition, is how the organization makes its money. When Operations leadership say job, typically the rest of the organization says how high on the way down. Only Operations can create the sense of urgency needed to effect real, sustainable change.
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