
The problem comes when some of us (and yes, we are embarrassed to admit
that we have done this too) have gone to the next step. There are many in the
safety profession who use these pictures regularly as a means to get laughs out
of their audience. This could be in a training class, to show how dumb some
workers are, or, it could be done amongst safety professionals, such as on a
social media site. You even occasionally see people post these as “Safety
Darwin Awards”, the implication being that these pictures are an example of
natural selection weeding out the less intelligent and capable of us.
Sharing these pictures with the intention of making fun of workers
or insulting their intelligence has to stop. We are better than this!
To illustrate what we’re talking about let’s look at the
implications of sharing these pictures in a way that ridicules workers. First
of all, it turns us into bullies. We are trivializing the realities our workers
face and not only thinking badly about them, we are openly ridiculing them to
others! Whether we intend to or not, we are saying that they are stupid. And if
we go far enough to use a frame such as the “Darwin Awards”, we are implying
that these people deserve to be hurt or killed because they are so stupid. Why
would we be at all surprised if our workers don’t trust us? Why are we so
annoyed that they don’t like when we come around, when it’s possible we might
take a picture of them and publicly shame them for a mistake? Don’t get us
wrong – we are not saying that what we are seeing in the picture is acceptable.
We are saying though that public shaming may have significant negative
consequences that we do not intend, but are real nonetheless.
Second, when we post pictures such as this on social media or in a
training class we are making a statement about where we think the problem is in
our organizations – workers doing stupid things. The implication is that if it
weren’t for our workers being dumb we would be safe. Our organization is
inherently safe, it’s just a few bad apples that are spoiling things. Here’re some examples. Don’t be like them!
This line of thinking just doesn’t jive with reality. Think about it
– how many of your organizations are perfect? Hm…none? If we had to guess we’d
say that many of you have consistent problems in your organization:
- Aging or poorly designed equipment
- Not enough resources (time, money, people, etc.)
- Inadequate training
- Outdated procedures
- Conflicting goals
Any of these sound familiar? If no, then you obviously work in the
unicorn factory and you can stop reading now. For the rest of us, this means we
have an imperfect system and a lot of your risk stems from these imperfections.
You not only have to deal with these imperfections, but your employees do as
well. However, most organizations we’ve worked with do not have any systematic
way to assist employees in dealing with this complexity. We leave it to the
employees to figure out. So we have a gap between what we know to be true and
how we act. We know our organization is imperfect, but when it comes to safety
we approach it with the understanding that our system is perfect. So if we see
a picture like the one above then the reason behind that picture isn’t that we
haven’t provided the worker with the tools (equipment, knowledge, etc.)
necessary to do the work safely and they are naturally adapting what they have
in order to get the job done in the safest way they know possible. It’s not our
fault. It’s that they are dumb (or sometimes because they are immoral).
When we see these sorts of pictures we need to step back and take a
hard look at how we react and what that says about our safety worldview. And
what does what we do with our gut reaction say about us as professionals? The
time has come for our profession to grow up and stop ridiculing the people
we’re trying to help.