Recent article by Phil LaDuke on his Blog
Phil says: "Near miss reporting is the Holy Grail of safety management, but is it really as valuable as people think? In this week’s post i take a look at whether or not this cherished part of safety is a waste of time and resources. As much as I enjoy the slavering rants of those who react in outrage to the post title , I’m really hoping you will give it a read and let me know what you think."
Tilting At Windmills: The Madness of Near Miss Reporting
By Phil La Duke – see the whole article here: http://philladuke.wordpress.com/2013/05/18/tilting-at-windmills-the-madness-of-near-miss-reporting/
Perhaps the quickest and surest way to lose credibility with workers, if not the entire organization is to ask for information and then do nothing with it. Ask a worker for a suggestion for making the workplace safer and then (at least seemingly in the eyes of the worker) ignoring it, or dissecting it to the point that everyone has long since caring about it.
Collecting data for collection’s sake happens a lot in worker safety. We love to gather information, hoard it, report it, and sometimes even analyze it. The unrelenting pursuit for near miss reporting is the great white whale that compels otherwise sane and reasonable safety professionals to a fool’s errand, the Seven Cities of Cibola of safety just out of grasp and wanted so desperately by safety professionals. Why?
Recently I was discussing the latest retread of Heinrich’s Pyramid with a handful of overly academic and painfully earnest theoreticians who work ostensibly in the service of safety. The subject at hand, a crudely scrawled graphic of an iceberg splattered with PowerPointless mental salver, as if some virtual vandal had tagged it with inane graffiti.
The pictograph in question is the new metaphor for teaching the great unwashed the relationship between the number of hazards, first aid cases, recordable incidents, serious injuries, and fatalities. It’s another, “no kiddin’?”, ” hit ‘em over the head” condescension that safety autocrats trot out every so often to demonstrate how much smarter they are than the “ordinary” mortals of the shops, warehouses, wards, mills, mines, and shipping docks, who pushed to it, would admit that they care not one whit about the theories of safety. Most workers would rather not die horribly in the workplace; that’s their primary concern safety theory, for them is just a lot of hot air from a lot of people who don’t work all that hard for a living.
Do you have any thoughts? Please share them below