People power in risk management strategies

Geoff Trickey on how OSH professionals can break with an ‘enforcer’ tradition to make new people-centred models of risk management a success.

In 2014, Erik Hollnagel published Safety-I and Safety-II; Sidney Dekker’s second edition of Safety Differently followed in 2015. The progressive ideas in these books have contributed greatly to the debate on ‘positive risk management’ and found attentive audiences in OSH journals and at conferences. The narrative around risk management is increasingly being infiltrated by a new terminology: ‘people-centric’, ‘inclusive’, ‘plus one’, ‘beyond compliance’, ‘culture of mutual trust’, ‘person-centred thinking’ and ‘risk-aware decision-making’. Reflecting this, accountancy firm EY has said: ‘It is necessary to step forward to a new, more relevant, effective way of managing safety.’

All this adds up to a well-researched and well-articulated package, and one that has considerable appeal to risk practitioners. So, while there are many very positive initiatives to promote good safety practices, why is it taking so long to turn the tide on one-size-fits-all approaches? Those approaches see people as the problem rather than as a potential solution; they quantify safety solely in terms of failures rather than focusing on positives and possibilities; they attempt to script tasks in fine detail rather than encouraging workspace expertise and judgement; and see operatives as accountable to bureaucratic processes rather than encouraging personal responsibility.  

Apprehensive of change

The first answer lies in an industry heritage that has often been rigidly prescriptive. Whatever the intention, where an ‘enforcer’ style of practice has developed, rigid task specifications have been viewed as a means of shifting responsibility from management onto those in the frontline. These traditional approaches will inevitably have firm advocates – not least because not everyone embraces change, and some firmly resist it. Whether or not they are on side with the new ‘positive safety’ vision, they will naturally be apprehensive about any transition into the unfamiliar.

‘The overwhelming tendency is still to view risk as something objective that can be calculated and precisely mitigated. Yet, if the resulting efforts ignore the human factors involved, they will accomplish nothing’ Michael Mazarr, senior political scientist, RAND Corporation (Mazarr, 2016).  

The human factor

The second explanation is that understanding safety incidents, events and procedures is very different from understanding people as individuals.

People face very different personal challenges in terms of their risk awareness and vigilance. Professional training and employee safety induction has adopted an approach that relies on regulations, safety principles, protocols, procedures, company policy and detailed task specifications – with little consideration of the complexities of human nature embraced by the positive safety vision.

Traditional strategies may not have achieved the holy grail of zero incidents, but they have achieved some notable successes. To the more traditionally minded risk professionals, positive risk management may seem an obscure long-shot and the proposed emphasis on considering individuality and its implications may be troubling to some.  ‘It calls for a kind of thinking that is quicker to trust people and mistrust bureaucracy. We need to trade our vocabularies of control, constraint, and human deficit for new vocabularies of empowerment, diversity, and human opportunity’ (Dekker, 2015).  A new way of thinking Third, any significant cultural development requires deep change. Entire professions are not likely to be easily influenced by persuasion, or by proposing a new set of values. To achieve a change of direction of the magnitude suggested by positive safety, practitioners themselves must be enabled to believe in a new approach and to see the same safety objectives differently. It requires an ‘X factor’ that influences the way a person thinks about themselves and their role – in short, a change in their sense of professional identity. For example, the professional identity of HR, and its ascent into boardroom influence, was achieved in part by the wholesale adoption of psychometric personality profiling techniques during the 1970s.

‘Operational innovation is truly deep change, affecting the very essence of a company: how its work is done. It has been central to some of the greatest success stories in recent business history’ (Hammer, 2004).

Arguably, we have overinvested in speculating about risk and what to do about it, and underinvested in the people required to implement those conclusions. Regardless of the current methods of risk identification, probabilistic quantification of risk and the detail of task specification, many people – perhaps even most people – will still see things differently. That is a challenge for any approach that seeks an ideal of blind obedience. Most people will want to follow the rules and will be disappointed with themselves if they let others down or lose their job. But people are complex, different and variable; things can go wrong in so many ways. A person’s urgency, vigilance, distractibility, forgetfulness, boredom, enthusiasm, disorganisation, prioritisation, or concentration levels will – from time to time, or just on the day that it mattered most – just not cut it.

Diversity at every level has been nature’s number-one strategy for the propagation of life. No two living things, of any kind, are exactly alike. Humanity is the ultimate in diversification. And this is especially true regarding the dispositions that define an individual’s relationship with risk and decision-making.

Risk is subjective. People perceive it differently and react to it differently. This influences behaviour in the social, recreational and financial domains as well as in the OSH domain. Crossing roads, spending money, planning holidays, being on time, remembering anniversaries, avoiding speed awareness courses or following fitness regimes – some people do, and some don’t. All that diversity suits nature’s cause very well. If we all reacted to all events in the same way, our species would be very vulnerable. But there is little danger of that. 

People cannot be herded. The policy of even-handedly scaring people into compliance during the pandemic wrought devastation among the already petrified and simply alienated those with an equally rational but different point of view. The former may never recover.  

Against blind obedience

The important cornerstone in building a people-centric OSH culture is to recognise and address head on the individual differences that, within a one-size-fits-all approach, are regarded as a threat to blind obedience – differences are considered as something to be disciplined and suppressed. Suppression of human nature is inherently fragile and the wrong approach. Rather, attention must be paid to the identification of personality traits that facilitate success alongside those that don’t. Everybody has some of each. This diversity is a defining characteristic of human nature – and of life. 

Humanity’s wide range of dispositions towards risk and uncertainty have combined to ensure our evolutionary success. The recent ability to differentiate these differences in risk disposition has been a potential game changer – not to the requirement for safe behaviour, but in the way those objectives might be achieved. People with different ‘risk types’ face different compliance challenges, and these must be recognised and addressed.

‘We cannot command Nature except by obeying her’ Francis Bacon (1561-1626).

The relationship between risk and decision-making is self-evident: risks call for decisions to be made, and decision-making involves risk. Neuroscience tells us that two independent systems – emotion and cognition – are involved in decision-making, and these highly reliable scales became the basis of the Risk Type Compass (RTC): see Figures 1 and 2 above. This psychometric tool was originally designed to allow financial advisers to meet a regulatory requirement to assess the risk ‘comfort zone’ of prospective clients, but applications quickly extended into the coaching of traders, development of investment advisory boards, work with hedge funds and team and board development programmes.

As a personal development tool, the focus on decision-making gets to the heart of organisational success and failure. Whether with boards, risk managers or on the frontline, the prospects are exciting. All are in the same boat and subject to the same formative influences of human nature. Everyone has something to learn. These commonalities are indifferent to profession or status. In the context of an organisational change programme, this is a shared experience – a journey that unites boards, executives, managers and operatives in a common purpose. The RTC also provides a framework, a taxonomy and a vocabulary that contributes to a resolution of the three resistance points (see panel, page 33).

Maybe this is the time for the OSH profession to grasp the opportunity? Risk management is everyone’s responsibility.

Geoff Trickey is CEO and chartered psychologist at Psychological Consultancy Ltd, and creator of the Risk Type Compass psychometric tool.