Friday Randomness #1 : Five saved posts/links/articles from the archives
What do you do when your saved LinkedIn posts, links and articles haven’t been cleaned out in many, many moon? Are they still relevant years later?
We’re going to find out…here we go!
Six Pieces of Small, Low Hanging Fruit That Might Improve Your Tomorrow :
- Fix something that is easy to fix.
- Listen to the people around you who are closest to the work.
- Make the hard phone call.
- Respond to the hard emails.
- Do the on-line training.
IMCA HSSE 038 Mooring incidents
Safety-II: the brand new concept of the “complex” Swiss Cheese Model 2/2
Lessons learned from the aviation community. Looking at the event probability and safety focus from Erik Hollnagel (and courtesy Pierre Wannaz via LinkedIn), we see that “Safety-I” focus on the roughly 2.3% of operations that become an accident or disaster. What of the 95% of the time in the middle where the outcome is positive (or at least not negative?
How do we capture that?
We should understand Safety-I and the mechanisms that support it, such as Reason’s Swiss Cheese Model, but realize we are looking at a very small subset of everyday operations when we focus only on the times something goes wrong.

Bob Latino of Prelical Solutions LLC took a look at the normalization of deviance. There’s a great graphic in the article – well worth taking a look.
The following quote from James A. Baker III leads the article off and provides the title :
“Preventing process accidents requires vigilance. The passing of time without a process accident is not necessarily an indication that all is well and may contribute to a dangerous and growing sense of complacency. When people lose an appreciation of how their safety systems were intended to work, safety systems and controls can deteriorate, lessons can be forgotten, and hazards and deviations from safe operating procedures can be accepted.
Workers and supervisors can increasingly rely on how things were done before, rather than rely on sound engineering principles and other controls.
People can forget to be afraid!”
Complacency certainly hasn’t gone away in the past 4 years, so what has YOUR organization done to combat it?
Todd Conklin talks about self-fulfilling prophecies in this Safety Moment from 2019. He talks of building robust, resilient systems with the capacity to withstand failure. There are 2 ways to make leaders change.
You can talk to them, teach them and convince them.
OR
You can act them into it. To become more humble leaders, better listeners with the ability to lead high-risk organizations in the ability to do high-risk work safely and with resilience.
Click on the picture above to go to the podcast.
And there they are – 5 posts/links/articles from the wayback machine. It seems to me that even after 4 years, a global pandemic and all the other uproar we have seen, these are still very pertinent.
Let’s be safe out there.