Workplace injuries on the rise

In “Why Leaders Don’t Learn From Success” by Franceso Gino and Gary R. Pisano in Harvard Business Review April 2011, it was argued that success can breed failure.  We all know that learning from failure is important, but how many companies learn from their success?

When we do well, we’re likely to believe that our staff, our safety equipment and our safety procedures are the reason why our staff have a good safety record.   Psychologists call this fundamental attribution errors.

But another quality that can lead to our downfall is the overconfidence bias.  This is when we believe that everything is so good that we don’t need to change anything.

However, the most interesting aspect that Gino and Pisano attribute to downfall is the failure to ask why syndrome.  This is the tendency by humans to not investigate the causes of good performance.  Senior teams no longer ask the tough questions which enable understanding of why safety is going well (and therefore, what they should keep doing).

Companies too often believe that their safety record is due to their excellent managerial skills, yet, it could through be through sheer good luck.  Success makes us believe that we are better decision makers than we actually are.

Mind the Oil

Let’s think about the BP oil spill crisis.  Before that time, BP believed that they were doing an excellent job of managing safety.  Now, in retrospect, many flaws were found in their safety system.  They cut a lot of corners in their risk assessment process.

Margaret Heffernan author of the book Wilful Blindness found that the BP Oil disaster was at some level caused by senior leaders who were cut off from how the business operates.  Their assumed power gave them a distorted view of their own skills which made them rely on snap judgements and received wisdom.  Heffernan says “It’s power.  Not your power.  It makes you intrinsically more optimistic and detached from the reality of the world.  You become psychologically cut off” (you can read more about this in “How to get Senior Leaders more Involved in Communication”).

We’re so good because we just are

With success, there is no evidence that you need to change strategy.  Even Toyota with its highly applauded production process that is built around uncovering problems and continuous learning failed to measure why it was being successful.  The result being thousands of car recalls, which senior leadership believing that being successful led them to pursue higher sales which had blinded them to the fact that operations had comprised quality to achieve growth.

Why getting an “A” needs as much review as an “F”

As Marcus Buckingham wrote in the great book “Go Put Your Strengths to Work”, when a child comes home with a report card that has one A, four B’s and one F, it’s the rare parent that would say  “Well done, you’ve got an A.  What did you do in that class to get an A”?  Most parents would fret on the F and focus on how to get their child to improve in that area.  Parents spring into action when their child is doing badly, but don’t think much about it when their child is doing well.  Humans have a tendency to have a problem focus, rather than a solutions focus.

In the book, Switch by Dan and Chip Heath, they mention that companies need to look at “bright spots”.  The areas in which people are making something work really well, whether that be a good safety record or higher sales.  Staff that are performing exceptionally well are then studied for what they are doing differently.  Then, they are used to train other staff on how to improve.

The next time your company produces some great safety results – celebrate, but find out why.  Build up your strengths, rather than focus on your weaknesses.  Investigate why you got such a good result with as much detail as you would an accident.  After all, there is much to learn from our successes as with our failures.