11. Safety policies and procedures - the weak link

Why aren’t policies and procedures intended to maintain safety more effective? I suspect it’s because they compete with other cultural values.

For example, a worker who shortcuts a safety procedure at a process control plant because it takes too much time is prioritizing an immediate, tangible, and rewarded cultural value (efficiency) over an abstract policy intended to prevent a rare and unexpected outcome. In this case, the tangible value of saving time and effort outweighs the real cost of following a less efficient procedure when the real outcome is almost certain to be the same in either case. Then the exceptional tragic outcomes raise questions about why the procedure wasn’t followed.

I think that safety policies and procedures will continue to be weak barriers unless they themselves are tied to a recognized and widely shared cultural value. I suggest that value be ethics. After all, safety is ultimately an ethical issue. The people involved have a fiduciary responsibility for safety, and if the organizational culture can associate following safe practices to the ethic of protecting oneself and others, maybe that would help balance out the competing value of efficiency.

This extends to how an organization deals with surprises that challenge their expectations and beliefs. Does that organization value humility and learning? Is it ready to acknowledge failures and improve? Or is it so committed to its traditional expectations of how the world should be that it rejects contrary evidence about how it actually is? If a learning culture is a safety culture, it requires recognizing and questioning one’s own assumptions and being ready to learn when they may not be valid. And if safety is an ethical issue, the humility and curiosity needed to question assumptions and learn should be as well.