Are we doomed to live in an oppressive safety culture?
May 9th, 2008 by johnadams
Martin Parkinson raises an interesting question (comment on previous post): what should be the reaction to an accident that, a priori, was an extremely low probability event? He suggests that “any attempt to reverse the counterproductive aspects of ‘health and safety culture’ is doomed to failure”. After an accident he argues that most people will say, “well that tragic accident which just occurred could have been easily avoided – it would be unthinkable not to make the obvious small change which would avoid a repetition”. Further, he adds, “the accident might have been freakish and unforeseen, but if there is a seemingly easy and cheap “fix”, then no responsibly-minded person would fail to make that fix …there is no logical point at which you can say your environment has “just the right amount of apparent danger”.
This is an issue that I probed in a recent essay “Dangerous trees?”. See the section entitled “Fault trees, event trees and trees”.
Britain’s Health and Safety Executive declares risks of death of less than 1:1,000,000 to be “acceptable” - defined as “generally regarded as insignificant and adequately controlled”. But how should such risks be calculated? If one divides the number of people killed by trees in Britain every year by the population, the risk works out at about 1:10,000,000. Acceptable? Only until someone is killed.
After the event it is usually possible to identify the cause and the person(s) responsible. A risk worth taking becomes culpable negligence. Hindsight transforms an “acceptable” risk with a probability of 1:10,000,000 into one with a probability of 1:1.
The fear of becoming the legally-liable victim of such a transformation, assisted by no-win-no-fee lawyers, is perhaps the main driver of the excessive risk aversion that bans hanging flower baskets and forbids conkers without goggles. For most institutional risk managers, outside hedge funds, there are no rewards for taking risks, only costs for failure. For them, one accident is one too many. No set of circumstances for which they might be held responsible can be too safe.
Escape from the suffocating safety culture that such reasoning produces can be sought in a “blame-free” culture. After a low-probability “freakish” accident, emphasis should be placed not on establishing guilt and punishment, but on lessons to be learned. Judges, juries and the Health and Safety Executive have important roles to play. Reconstructed foresight, not 20/20 hindsight, should be the standard against which culpability for freakish accidents should be judged.
Thanks Martin for your highly pertinent comments.
Me again. Couple of quick comments.
I’ll admit that your point - (that an important driver for overcaution is the fear of being sued) – had not occurred to me when I posted. This tendency - to underestimate the power of external and social pressures and to attribute behaviour primarily to individuals’ internal dispositions - is known to experimental psychologists as “the fundamental attribution error”. I’m fond of citing the FAE as an example of a universal cognitive bias, so I feel sheepish but amused when I make that same error myself!
Even so, I still think that there are ‘internal’ factors which sometimes come into play - though perhaps these are less prominent in an organisational context. Blame is very popular (I think it might even be connected with the FAE). So is cheap helpfulness. Telling someone what to do, giving them an order, can sometimes be a power-play, a small attempt at domination and therefore likely to be resented and resisted. So how attractive to give orders in the context of safety, where your motives are unimpeachable! (An example: the repeated outbreaks of ‘helmet wars’ on cycling e-lists, often starting with something like “You should wear a helmet - you are really stupid if you don’t!”).
So anyway, apprehension of being sued and blamed. How might one create a ‘low-blame culture?’. How about a ‘no-fault compensation system’ as opposed to our adversarial tort-based system. There are a few no-fault systems in the world (notably in Canada and New Zealand) and interestingly a quick google of ‘no-fault compensation’ brought up many references from people arguing for such a system here in a medical context. This makes sense as far as I can see. Fear of being sued, as people become more litigious, forces clinical decision-making onto a more aggressively interventionist path which might not be to the ultimate benefit of the patient (because all interventions have side effects). Sometimes it really is better to *do nothing* - but often that’s a rather difficult thing to do.