Tough Questions & Quotes: Question

Question

You are an electrical engineer and tasked to repair plant that is broken down, you have to do this ASAP because 100,000 people in town will lose all power including the hospital that has not backup power as it being serviced, if you don't fix it you will loose your job under blame. You do not have another safety device to replace the one that failed, but you could override this safety device and this "should" work ok, but if the override fails it will cause $500,000 in damage. Do you override?

My Quote 87

We can fix complexity by slowing down to a point so that any new idea is not adding much more than what we know.

What we seem to do in our culture is 'jump' and 'skip' past stepping stones that if stepped and balanced on would ease our way simply through a transition of complete understanding. What makes our current way of rush and haste (we really are in a rush for who knows why) problematic and complex is the missing of the those steps. In a way its like making your child go from grade four to grade seven (skipping 5 and 6) ...in which grade 7 would seem highly complex to them (that if they had not skipped those years would not be complex)...

My Quote 53

I have seen "expert safety writers" go as far as criticising the general safety person for giving poor inductions; who said inductions are the sole responsibility of the safety person? Part of an induction should a safety topic, part of it should be HR, part of it production, etc etc. But guess who is the most convenient and cheaper option...the safety person. How many mangers do you see give an induction? nil!

It seems true to me that some people have targeted that safety person and will lay all blame onto them...it's a dam shame they have such small perspective.

My Quote 45

You cannot "think" unconsciously as some people say. The act of thinking requires the use of the prefrontal cortex, Inferior Frontal Gyrus, temporal and Parietal lobe. To "think" you need to make judgment, reason etc, this takes effort. The lazy use of the unconscious mind over the conscious mind is a mind void of judgment, hence risk cannot be judged, hence habitual habits reoccur.
If you are running on autopilot, you are void of rational thought. What wakes you from this state of void is something new, it is then you think.

My Quote 21

"Now, again we have this point raised about the need to include (psychology) human factors or human judgment in the risk assessments process with no solution given, just advice. We cannot even get the basics of risk assessment right as currently prescribed let alone having to understand the complexity of psychology and or having to employ psychologists to evaluate, diagnose, treat, and study human behavior and mental processes so to make more rules or give more advice on controlling/directing whatever human behavior may result in harm and poor decisions"

My Quote 17

"The reasons why rules are applied into our existence are because humans do wrong things constantly. We simply cannot have humans running around acting all human like, doing what they please at a time that suits them; we’d end up like the city of Sodom, and then we would have to implement all sorts of over reactive constraints and schemes and hire expert consultants to come in and listen to the issues so the problem of being human can be fixed using the ability to know the unknown of uncertainty...the human has access to freedom, but look what he does with it"

My Quote 82

Dis-empowered... Bye the powered!

“It’s easy to moan and redirect your responsibility, because so much seems out of our control — the bad economy, life requirements, system changes, un-organised goods, and many other disturbances. Many people feel dis-empowered by the complexity of our matrix styled structures, slow decision-making, and extra layers of humanising systems. The bottom line is that it’s tough to get things done when so many barriers exist; people, environment and ourselves — which leaves people feeling frustrated and in need of a sympathetic ear. In other words, the combination of human nature and a tough environment makes a “no whining” rule more important than ever...there are just too few ears hearing” MD

My Quote 36

I think OHS in Australia needs to be re-evaluated on this basis; to include all influences required to make the best choices. I think that (but don’t necessarily like it) we are creatures of systems, creatures that are programmed to follow, we are creatures set and governed by laws and rules. We need to collectively agree that this is the only option we have (as the open options seem to over complicate everything) and set rules etc as non negotiable to stop everyone going off making things up as they go along.

My Quote 16

The next step in safety is being permitted to have practicable time to apply safety practices so that people can act or be given the means to act in safe or safer way. It’s about providing real risk mitigation measures that have been learned though years of negative events. It’s about being able to use these rules provided in a manner in which they are prescribed. I have not been involved in one organisation yet that has used the prescribed methods fully. It’s not totally their fault, it’s our culture of pressures that make way for short cutting.