Fountain’s Footsteps

I remember taking our daughter over the stepping stones at Studley Royal gardens in her pushchair a few years ago.  I was surprised to see that the stepping stones are now no longer.  Disappointment for my children and dismay from me.

The removal of the stones cannot be a health and safety decision, can it?  Not a IOSH member surely?  After all, they remind us daily that their members don’t do that kind of thing …

Stepping stones, Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal

Yep, you bet.  I’ve just done a quick search and here is the BBC coverage of the story.

Difficult to live in a profession infested with so many who see it as their role to surgically extract the fun out of life.  Have they no shame?

Healthy and sensible attitude to risk?

IOSH President Elect:

“our children need to be given the freedom to exercise, to learn to get on with their peers, develop their imagination, have fun and build healthy and sensible attitudes towards everyday risks.”

What is a HEALTHY AND SENSIBLE ATTITUDE TOWARD EVERYDAY RISKS, John?

Let’s think.  On the matter of sexual partners and sexual proclivity, what should we advise our children to do?  On the matter of drugs, where does the current healthy and sensible attitude reside?  Alcohol?  Internet access?  Porn?  Social web2.0?  What if my son decides he wishes to join the Army?  How about partying when on holiday with your mates?

Now John, instead of regurgitating frankly pointless sound-bites, please post your colours to the mast.  What is IOSH’s position in relation to a healthy and sensible attitude toward everyday risks such as these?  Join the debate.

For what it is worth I wish for my own children to develop an attitude towards risk that is informed.  I then hope that they will occasionally be anything but sensible, hell sometimes their actions might also be downright unhealthy, but so long as they are making a decision then they have my blessing.

Common sense, sensible … why does the safety industry establishment have to qualify risk with overloaded but meaningless terms, to the extent that they come across like a bunch of grey-suited, priggish, anal-retentive, moralising busy-bodies?

Goddamn it John, you sound like my bloody mother when I was growing-up.  And I didn’t listen to her.

Competence

Judith Hackitt:

“We need everyone in the system to be competent to play their part – competent to assess and manage risk by applying common sense and a proportionate approach, confident to exercise judgement about what is reasonable.”

Competent … applying common sense.  LOL.  I know, let’s get a common sense accreditation!  A quango is needed – OffSense, with highly paid quangocrats with a big stamp APPROVED COMMON SENSE.

Thus “common sense” would equate to the knowledge and experience “OffSense” believed people do or should have.  Just think of the common sense things they could have supported in the past or continue to support:  a flat earth; sun orbits the earth; NewLabour were new; house prices can only go up; Gordon was a good chancellor; the UK can’t possibly go bust; man can cause climate change; the UK can survive as a service economy; your data is safe with the state; terrorism really is a major threat … think of your own examples.

We need a common sense BRAND, a little logo that companies can put at the bottom of their official correspondence, demonstrating clearly and profoundly they agree with everyone else – bye, bye innovation.

But, really, I think safety people who use the phrase actually mean “agree with me” or are insisting that a social norm, regardless of morality, is “right”.

Stop using this phrase, please.  Albert was right about prejudices and 18.  Dangerous when the state starts proclaiming common sense.

PS:  If I knew what it meant I feel sure that I could be “confident in excersising judgement about what is reasonable”.  For example, I’m confident that those who write Judith’s speeches are turnips.  Seems reasonable and common sense, please agree with me.

Free Publications

Judith Hackitt:

“our announcement at the strategy launch that over £1 million worth of current paid for publications are to be made freely available via our website”

It remains hugely irritating that publications communicating information intended to save people from harm is charged for now that digital makes the effective cost of distribution zero.  I welcome this announcement, which comes years too late, but it clearly doesn’t go far enough.  All HSE publications should be free for digital download – this would be a benfit to small businesses.

And while we’re on, all HSE related EN standards and their BS equivalents should be available for free digital download, including 18001 and 14001 and related standards.

Safety clearances for overhead lines

For my own reference:

National Grid part 1

National Grid part 2

Crane contact

A voltage gradient of 30,000V per cm is needed for electricity to arc through air.  Contact with the conductor and the arc is initiated, a voltage difference of only 20V per cm is needed to maintain the arc.  Therefore, a long arc can be maintained once contact has been made.

Koller et al. 1994 “An important fact is that arcing will cross 2-3 cm for every 10,000 V (Skoog, 1970) so that no direct contact is necessary to trigger arcing at 25,000 V. In addition, once an electrical arc is established, it may extend over several metres (Skoog, 1970). The so-called critical distance is the distance between the power source and another grounded subject which may trigger arcing. In moving subjects, such as in our victims, the arcing can be triggered over a longer distance than in static ones.”

OSHA “mechanical equipment, should remain at least 10 feet (3.05 meters) away from overhead power lines. If the voltage is more than 50,000 volts, the clearance increases by 4 inches (10 centimeters) for each additional 10,000 volts”.

Initiated arc on YouTube.

Greenwald, pointing out that an arc is harder to initiate through moist air.

Look Up! Look Down! Look Out!

Culture

To people

For people

With people

By people

I like this classification relating to organisational culture which has been described in EHSToday.

I was immediately reminded on Ricardo Semler’s work or The End of Management by Cloke and Goldsmith.

For me the ‘to people’ is dictatorship; ‘for people’ is autocracy; ‘with people’ is also autocracy; and ‘by people’ is democracy.

But I do find myself disagreeing with a few of the points.  Firstly, I wouldn’t consider these cultures as steps of a process to be gone through.  The sense that one starts with a dictatorship and moves in stages towards organisational democracy I think is wrong.

Secondly, I dislike the normative inferences about the ‘by people’ culture.  Culture is too big and complex a topic to make such a conclusion.  It could be that a ‘by people’ culture simply meets with a neo-liberal Western orthodoxy.

Thirdly, I’m not sure that the culture change spoken of in the article within a safety context can be achieved without a concomitant change in all other organisational functions.  Can you imagine going with a ‘by people’ plan for safety in an paternal dictatorship?

Finally, for the safety manager thinking of implementing towards ‘by people’ then be prepared to jettison a large amount of the conventional wisdoms about how safety is managed.  For example, HSG65 tends to assume a traditional, hierarchical, bureaucratic, ‘them-n-us’, corporate, pre-Web2.0 generation – an Autocracy!  It, and HSWA, are really starting to show their age in this respect.

For example, in a ‘by people’ culture people are likely not to sign for their bloody PPE … yeah, making you think isn’t it? And what of audit?  An invention of the autocracy.

Unfortunately, safety educators have bred a generation of autocrats.  Why?  Because the organisations setting and delivering the education are autocracies themselves.

I see no evidence that the ‘by people’ is going to gain a major breakthrough any time soon – certainly not in the state sector where, in the UK, many would argue that the culture is moving from ‘for people’ to ‘to people’.

And nor, given my most recent experience, in contractor management, where the client / principal contractor acts like benevolent or even malevolent dictators to their contractors – yeah, ‘by people’ has to work within that relationship too.

NB

I’ve recently finished Team of Rivals, a biography of Lincoln, so this culture classification reminds me of his Gettysburg Address:

“…that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish for the earth”

suggesting that the ‘by people’ culture is reflective, in the sense that it is decidedly for people to!

A good way to finish this post on the 4th July.  God Bless the USA.

Signage

Rebuttal to the Rebuttal

Am I the only one who has never understood the insistence on regarding signage as some kind of ‘last resort’ to be deployed when all other risk treatment options are exhausted? [like PPE]

This thought process prevails within the profession and is again in evidence in an HSE rebuttal to an article run by the Daily Mail featuring the Manifesto Club.

I quote: “safety signs are useful when there’s a significant risk which can’t be avoided or controlled in any other way”.

Let me take exception to a few things in this sentance.

Firstly, a risk cannot be avoided with a safety sign.  The message of the sign is most likely to affect the chance of an event rather than exposure or consequence.  And event chance cannot be reduced to zero.

Secondly, for most [all?] risks there are always controls in place, whether explicit or implicit, recognised or unrecognised; therefore, the idea that a sign is used when there is no other treatments in place is misleading.

Indeed signs are reliant on the fact that there are other treatments – otherwise the sign could simply say ‘Prepare for Harm’, since without those other treatments the circumstances by which the risk is realised would most likely arise.

Finally, significant … I know safety people use this word with abandon, but it really is meaningless.  Why not simply say risk?

The profession repeats these simplistic received wisdoms that are at best half-truths and at worst downright misleading ad nauseum.  Let’s get smarter and sharper, please.

Process is King

Plan – Do – Check – Act and its variants since Deming first coined it have proliferated in our systems management texts and standards.  Currently the HSE are pushing Plan – Deliver – Monitor – Review (why use 2 letters when 7 will do deliver?)

About 5-years ago when I was preparing to become a thrusting IT entrepreneur I became aware of business process management, an invention of the early-Noughties with Ismael Ghalimi and Assaf Arkin at its epicentre.

In the 1990’s, during numerous HSG65 type training sessions, I often quipped that if anyone could find a better approach to PDCA then they would become rich.  I didn’t really think that anything would come along.

Well, that was before business process management (BPM), business rules management (BRM), enterprise decision management (EDM) and their ilk (BAM, BI, …).

Health and safety has so far failed to grasp these new approaches.  Start thinking PROCESS not SYSTEM.

My BPM blog is here.

Safe Parking

A number of organisations now require reverse parking in their car-parks.  Something to do with alertness in the morning rather than the evening.

Let’s hope the drivers are better than this person:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uLECuGK07U&feature=channel

Avoidable

The press is leading with the death in action of the highest rank soldier since Colonel ‘H’ Jones in the Falklands over 25 years ago.  Lt Col Thorneloe was killed by a roadside bomb travelling in a comparatively lightly armoured vehicle.

This sad event, and those of all the other servicemen killed and injured in Afghanistan, is undeniably avoidable.  All accidents are.  Indeed we have a phrase in English that expresses this succintly: ‘if only’.  We’ve all thought this after some painful experience and it comes with the 20×20 vision provided by hindsight.

However, an avoidable accident doesn’t translate into one which is preventable.  Prevention means having foresight and that is so much tougher than hindsight.

Accompanying the recent publication of fatal accident data for the UK for last year was a press release by the HSE in which Dr Paul Stollard, HSE Director Scotland is quoted:

“The fact that 26 people failed to come home from work in Scotland last year because of avoidable safety failings is a terrible tragedy.”

The assertion made that each and every one of these workers deaths could have been avoided is true.  However, this conclusion is made with the benefit of hindsight.  What is not true is that each of these deaths could have been prevented.  It is even less accurate to conclude that all could have been prevented if the law was complied with.  If this were the case then we could expect that the HSE would institute proceedings against all the employers involved where such contracts exist.

The reality is that whilst all accidents are avoidable in hindsight it is not possible to prevent all such events with foresight.  Press releases such as this give the impression that certainty in accident prevention is achievable, if only rogue employers got their act together and implemented simple and sensible precautions.

This distorts the message and cheats the public into believing in an unobtainable goal.  The next time you suffer a loss, I don’t mean anything major, perhaps a mislaid possession, lost car keys etc., list all those ‘if onlys’ and no doubt you will find that many were simple and sensible.  But now wind back the clock to the time before the event.  Why didn’t you?  Now think to the future.  You will suffer another loss, of course we can’t know exactly what it might be.  What about implementing those simple and sensible precautions now, today, to stop that next event from happening?  Yeah, tough isn’t it?

Avoidable? Yes.  Preventable?  Clearly not once the event has happened.

When the UK army finally get delivered better defended vehicles the number of lives lost by roadside bombs is likely to drop.  Future lives lost will all again have been avoidable, unfortunately those that do occur will be the evidence needed to convince us that they are not all preventable.