Safety Is A Value

"We talk about what is important to us."
- Jacob Tetlow, APS

Regular safety meetings and striving for constant improvement are a sign that safety actually is important.  APS has regular safety meetings where we try to proactively create safer working conditions.  By sharing and talking about safety incidents we can learn from them before they happen to us.  "The wise man learns from others' mistakes."

APS is implementing a new safety program called Safety Foward, based on the ideas of Todd Conklin, a retired senior safety adviser from Los Alamos National Lab.  You can look up his talks on Youtube or look into his book “Pre Accident Investigations”.  He talks about the difference between resilient and fragile systems. A fragile system is liable to a single point of failure, for example, an operator-dependent system where the only safeguard against risk is the behavior of the employee.  Dr. Conklin says that such a system is basically "alligator wrestling" where you are telling the employee, "don't get bit!".

Some key ideas around moving Safety Forward
Create a resilient safety system: It's not IF an event occurs, but WHEN.
People are the solution: Employees doing the work are best suited to provide solutions to safety risks/hazards.
Focus on being a learning organization: Establish learning teams to collaborate and communicate learnings from an event or known risk.
Focus on leading indicators:  Focus on safety observations and serious injury or fatality (SIF) potential.

More notes

• Failure is the mother of improvement – viewing an accident as an opportunity to improve processes, procedures, and overall culture
• All accidents are not preventable and don’t ask “if” questions – ask “when” questions – sets up individuals to recover better for when an incident happens
• Design a system that knows it will fail
• Detection and correction are the two most powerful tools in safety – getting at the idea of recoverability
• Three main controls to number of accidents include Compliance (procedures, rules, regulations), Design (engineering controls for safety) and human performance (place where work meets the worker)
• The new view of safety looks at workers as the solution rather than the problem
• Safety leaders should be asking what workers need in order to be safe instead of leading safety from a top-down approach