Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Live From Safety 2014: Creating a "Deep Safe" Organization

Corrie Pitzer, a well-known consultant in strategic safety management, delivered an entertaining and engaging session, "Deep Safe: The Future of Safety (Engineering)," at ASSE's Safety 2014 in Orlando, FL. With a distinctive flair and charming wit, Pitzer shared a slightly different view of safety based on his experience working in high-hazard industries, such a mines in South Africa. "People are paralyzed by protection," Pitzer explained. "Human performance follows an 's' curve. When you reach compliance level, performance tapers off."

In many ways, Pitzer said, we have become so protected that we often don't even look anymore--we simply don't perceive the risk. He termed this the Titanic curve, "As we see an increase in protection, we see an increase in failure." People start pretending that things are safe, so much so that they start believing it. This, Pitzer called "paralysis by pretension," adding that we are "losing the clarity we need to truly analyze what is going on."

Pitzer also contended that too many incident investigations hone in on the negative attributes of human nature when instead employers should find ways to capitalize on human's best qualities--such as our ability to sense, be intuitive, imagine, perceive, innovate, sacrifice and inspire. And most of all, to be passionate. "You each have employees who can be awesome if you let them." This, he said, is the key to becoming a "Deep Safe" organization.

Pitzer also pointed to five characteristics of the U.S. Marine Corps as something companies should embrace in their efforts to create awesome employees and become Deep Safe companies:

  1. Attention to detail.
  2. Strict discipline.
  3. Obsessive loyalty.
  4. Systematically observant.
  5. Potency in risk.
What's also important, Pitzer concluded, is training workers how to recognize and deal with risk. This will help safety become "invisible" because it's ultimately not about books or manuals or checklists, but about what is inside of each of them.