“How many psychologists does it take to change a lightbulb? Just one, but the lightbulb really has to want to change.” Anonymous A former student, now working in industry, recently called me. He said he had a safety question. “How do you change safety culture? I can’t find that in my notes from your class.” [...]
“Have you ever noticed when something bad happens, people automatically look for someone to blame?” Amy Roberts I’m not a structural engineer, which means that I’m not qualified to comment on what went wrong when the pedestrian bridge at Florida International University collapsed on Thursday, March 15, 2018. I didn’t work on the design or [...]
“If you put good people in bad systems, you get bad results. You have to water the flowers you want to grow.” Stephen Covey When you think of workplace safety, what comes to mind? We tend to associate safety with hardhats and safety glasses. However, workplace safety is influenced by factors beyond the proper use [...]
“If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.” Isaac Asimov We recently facilitated a Process Hazard Analysis (PHA) where the question came up, “What if there was a release and an operator was suddenly overcome? How would we know?” The PHA team considered several possible safeguards: rounds, radio [...]
“We did not choose to be the guardians of the gate, but there is no one else.” – Lyndon B. Johnson In LOPA, the role of people can be broken down into three categories: Victims, villains, and heroes. Access control serves not only to reduce the number of victims but also restrict access for villains. [...]
“Safety is not an intellectual exercise to keep us in work. It is a matter of life and death. It is the sum of our contributions to safety management that determines whether the people we work with live or die.” Sir Brian Appleton A little over a year ago, in A Beginner’s Guide to Process [...]
“Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right.” Oprah Winfrey With 2017 coming to an end and 2018 just beginning, we’re provided with an opportunity to reflect on our accomplishments (and failures) of the past year while also looking ahead towards what we want to accomplish in the year [...]
Each December, the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes the final statistics workplace fatalities for the previous year. The 2016 statistics and chart package came out last month; we took a moment to look them over and there were few surprises: The overall fatality rate in 2016 was about the same as it was for the [...]
“I know you think you understand what you thought I said but I’m not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.” —Alan Greenspan I once heard a young operator complain, “All we do around here is safety training. Nobody understands half of it and the other half is just common [...]
“Air raid, Pearl Harbor. This is not a drill.” —Lt. Cmdr. Logan Ramsey, 7-Dec-1941 'Beauty' Ramsey sent one of the most famous telegrams of history after watching a Japanese dive bomber’s payload detonate in Pearl Harbor. Other telegrams went out that morning, from the Navy Yard and Kaneohe, but they were largely ignored until smoke [...]
