Damn that human nature. As safety professionals, we can admit that sometimes we wish our workers (bless their hearts) were programmable robots so we would know exactly what they are thinking, what they are doing and will do and we can ensure safety at all times.
At the same time, that unpredictability of human nature can often be the beautiful thing about human nature.
[Image from Wikipedia via a Creative Commons license]American warplanes from World War II, such as this Supermarine Spitfire, had a harder time going down from bullet holes after some redundancy was put in place. The same principle can apply to our worker-safety programs.
An example of this can be found in a story about American warplanes during World War II. The story goes that many planes limped home from Nazi Germany airspace riddled with holes from anti-aircraft guns, bullets from German planes, etc. The Army Air Corps (now known as the Air Force) gave out an order that all planes should have the holes reinforced with armor behind them to keep them from suffering fatal damage. However, one engineer spoke up, saying that was a bad idea – the thought should be to keep planes in the air by preventing more bullet holes, so he suggested putting the armor where there are no holes – creating a redundancy. He believed the chances of getting shot in the same spots were long but the chances of being shot in a new place were much higher, and putting armor in those areas would help keep the planes in the air longer.
The scientist was right.
The same thought process could apply to your safety program. Human nature says that mistakes will happen, and also some people will deliberately not follow protocols – in either case, it’s always a good idea to have some level of redundancy in your program so the “holes” don’t bring down the entire plane. Think of it in the sense of electricity – hospitals and other major buildings tend to have power generators as a back-up source of electricity just in case the main source of power falters.
Our policies and protocols are basically a straight line on a graph, similar to the electric grid giving off the same amount of power for the houses and office buildings on a grid. If you draw a squiggly line along that path, you basically cover human nature and the things that are done past expectations and those things that don’t meet up to standards. That same squiggly line explains the usage of electricity on our grid – there are times of high use and demand, and times of low use and demand.
Redundancies in our safety program is like a power generator – it provides a floor, so to speak. As the generator provides a minimal level of electrical power for a particular building just in case that straight line of power supply fails, our safety program should always have a floor or a net to catch a worker in case of a catastrophic breach in our protocols. Like the electric grid will fail from time to time, so too may our safety program. We need to always have ourselves covered.
Let’s make sure we put armor where there are no holes, so we can keep our plane flying.