"Safety First" is not merely a slogan

In the ancient time, there were only natural disasters. Now, we also have man-made crises. Natural disasters still happen, but their frequency and intensity lag far behind man-made catastrophes. Are we paying price of progress? Where did we go wrong?

The human mind is said to have no boundaries. Using this power, we have made astounding progress in the fields of science and technology. From ‘making fire by rubbing stones’ to ‘generating electricity through nuclear fission’, we have come a long way. We have harnessed natural powers to make our lives more comfortable and productive. However, this has not come free. Every technological advancement has come with its own inherent risks, which we claim to manage effectively. Modern cars are equipped with a load of safety features. Industrial plants are said to be built on fail-safe standards. We invest considerable amount of money in researching for the safest design. We study all the worst possible scenarios and claim to manage the risks as low as reasonably practicable through sophisticated safety systems. We develop stringent safety laws and standards. We set up enquiry commissions after every catastrophic incident and produce large volumes of investigation reports, which record pages after pages on the lessons learnt. But, are these lessons really learnt by human minds? Have we really stopped recurrence of similar failures?

It was scary to read the following statistics in a recent report published by KT:

• 3 people get killed on the road every minute,

• $ 3 trillion is the cost of road crashes every year, and

• 90% of road accidents happen due to human error.

Broad analysis of major industrial incidents also reveals that 90% of them can be attributed to the underlying safety culture at a facility making it acceptable for someone to ignore or bypass some critical step. Increased automation and loads of safety features seem to create a false sense of safety. Statistics have shown that more people die at pedestrian crossings than the ‘jay-walkers’, simply because people at pedestrian crossings often assume that vehicles would stop and hence become less alert. In a 1996 essay about the Challenger disaster, Malcolm Gladwell observed that “We have constructed a world in which the potential for high-tech catastrophe is embedded in the fabric of everyday life.” Having built systems with thousands of interacting components, we cannot possibly foresee all the ways they will behave under all circumstances, some of the circumstances themselves being unforeseeable.

Although we try to reduce inherent risks of any operation through safer design and/or operating procedure, human tendency is to consume this risk-reduction either by being aggressive in its usage or by being complacent with its false sense of safety. Higher the automation and sophistication, lower seems to be the human alertness. A machine can always be expected to perform as per its specifications. But, a human being cannot be expected to perform at its peak all the time. Emotions tend to greatly influence our actions. Even a competent person may fail under adverse emotions. While continuous training, knowledge-upgrade and competency assessments are important, taking care of emotional health is perhaps the most important factor in any safe operation. The human mind must remain motivated on the job. This, perhaps, is the single most critical responsibility of every team leader. A happy employee will always keep your clients happy.

We retain those lessons the longest, which we learnt through our own personal experiences. All other lessons we tend to forget after a short while, as our information-memory is short. This problem is further compounded by the lack of corporate memory due to which new employees often lack the benefits of lessons learnt by their predecessors. It is, therefore, necessary to convert such lessons in some form of personal experiences such as real-life simulations, rather than mere documented information. And, they should be repeated at regular intervals so as to become part of our spontaneous behaviours.

How we harness nature’s power is perhaps a more fundamental question. In ancient China, they say, when a master carpenter wanted to make a chair; he would go out to the forest asking which tree was willing to be cut for this purpose. The chair made out of such a tree lived for several decades without any degradation. Guiding a wild river from the mountains through barren lands spreads greenery and prosperity for generations. Consuming only those resources that we need for our day-to-day living would always leave enough resources for everybody on the earth. Nature likes to nurture harmony in everything. Any attempt to disturb this harmony will sooner or later result in serious backlash. Nature has strange ways of striking a balance.

Human intervention, however optimised, will always remain vital for any safe operation. Let “Safety First” not be a mere slogan. Next time, you step out to drive a car or operate a machine, check your emotion-meter for stability, expect the unexpected and pull out your attention-antenna all the way up.