by Dr Marina Papaioannou DNV’s Regional Maritime Academies Manager, Region South East Europe
My recent participation in a Safety Conference reminded me of a few things that I would like to share with you.
I made a presentation on the Effectiveness of training to enhance Safety and Safety behaviors and when thinking of what new to say to participants, so that they will not hear again the words “more training…..”, it became clear to me that the reason is very simple and very old indeed!
Statistics say that over 85% of incidents are due to what we call “Human Factors” still!!! And moreover, approximately 90% of them are attributed to “Human Behavior” (EMSA, 2021).
Therefore, it seems that regardless of all efforts made throughout the years, we have still not been able to tackle the issue and influence the “Human Factors” towards safer deeds.
But let’s take it from the beginning of discussing “safety Culture”. In the early days, we used to wait until something happened, usually an accident with overwhelming consequences, and then we tried to fix that, mainly through new regulations, thus minimizing the chance of it happening again. And this was called “Safety I” in the accident reports.
It was only a few years back that we realized that this reactive approach has helped neither our people nor the industry in general, improve on safety and it was then that we decided that we should look into the Human Factors and try to work proactively to eliminated the possibility of performance crossing safety boundaries, thus making as many things as possible go right. This approach we called “Safety II” and we have been working with it for quite some time now.
Both Safety I and Safety II models rely on the aim to reduce mistakes. And here comes the “new” element of the “Safety III” approach. “To err is human” and the sooner we understand and accept this the better we will prepare our people to react when crisis hits the door! Even the best people make mistakes. This is human nature. The key to the process is “Human Performance”. Therefore, safety is not the absence of accidents, it is the presence of capacity. It is, making sure that when – and not if – things go wrong, people will have the capacity to act accordingly minimizing the effects.
And by capacity we mean competence, a very strong word used so lightly nowadays that I feel I must define it with respect to what it includes. It is easy to find the definition on the internet; “Competence is the combination of attitude, skills, knowledge and behaviors that a person brings to a position that enables them to perform their tasks efficiently, safely and effectively” (OCIMF, 2018).
Let’s reflect a bit on these four words. Attitude is what we carry inside, our way of thinking that is influenced by our beliefs, values and principles; skills are specific learned abilities which enable a person to carry out the tasks and duties of a given job (ILO); knowledge is what we have learnt; and behaviour is what the others can observe when we act.
So you see everything is there! And especially behaviour, what the others see when we perform our everyday work. It is behaviour that we need to change so that performance and at the end behaviour works within safety barriers.
To do that, we need, amongst others, to create the CULTURE in our organization which will eventually determine people’s behaviour.
To achieve all that the 5 principles of human performance need to be applied:
- Error is normal. Even the best people make mistakes.
- Blame fixes nothing.
- Learning and improving is vital. Learning is deliberate and targeted. Learning mindset in place.
- Context influences behavior. Systems drive outcomes.
- How you respond to failure matters. How leaders act and respond counts.
When such a culture drives an organization then we will have reached the goal of:
Work as Imagined = Work as Done
And that is SAFELY!!
