Time to combat complacency

If you have 100 people in a room and you ask them to think about the most dangerous thing or the two most dangerous things they've ever done: whether it be with motor vehicles or chainsaws, then you ask them to think about the two worst injuries they've ever had, and then ask them to put their hand up or hit the yes button on the clicker if they have even one match, how many hands do you think you will see in the air?  We've done this with over 100,000 people – with hands and with clickers – and less than 5% have a match; there's usually only two or three hands in the air. This is quite illuminating for the 100 people in the room when they hardly see any hands or they see the graph on the screen from the clickers or audience response system. 

People just assumed that everybody else got hurt doing dangerous things. But when something is dangerous people pay attention. And when people pay attention, risk decreases. Unfortunately, when people aren't paying attention risk increases. And if a person has become complacent enough to periodically take their eyes off the task, in addition to their mind also being off task, then they won't even get a reflex. How much does getting a reflex affect the actual outcome? It's extremely important. For most people, over 80% of their serious injuries were when they didn't get the benefit of their reflexes – because at that critical moment their eyes were not on task and their mind was not on task. This means someone's level of complacency might very well be as good (or perhaps a better) predictor of the risk of SIF (Serious Injury and Fatality) than the amount of hazardous energy.

Calculating complacency

You might be wondering how you are supposed to calculate a person's level of complacency. This is easy – provided your employees are willing to tell you the truth. Simply approach one of your work-mates and ask: "On a scale of one to 10 (with a one being when you are concentrating hard on what you are doing – like driving – and a 10 being concentrating on something else, rather than what you should be doing, where are you on the scale for this specific task?”. Provided you give them the anchor points, most people can give you a pretty good answer. This  helps them 're-set', so to speak, and evaluate their level of complacency; it also helps them to think about the things that could potentially go wrong, in addition to safety, such as quality problems or a shipping label that wasn't accurate, etc. 

You should also ask them about their level of rushing, frustration and fatigue; it's rarely just complacency on its own. Usually it's a combination of rushing, frustration, fatigue and complacency. However, these four states, or a combination of them, are involved in more than 95% of all injuries, from minimal injuries like cuts and contusion to serious injuries and fatalities.

What is really important, however, is that the states come before the critical errors, which are: eyes not on task, mind not on task, (moving into or being in the) line-of-fire or (loss of/problems with) balance, traction or grip. This means we can use the states as triggers to prevent making critical errors. Except for complacency, which is really hard to self-trigger, so for complacency there are other critical error reduction techniques, such as working on safety-related habits, looking at others for risk patterns and analysing close calls, which will help either to compensate for complacency leading to mind not on task or help fight complacency by bringing us back to the moment. 

Probably the best way to fight complacency is to get the employee or person to rate their state, because then, they can think about all four states and all the problems they can cause with quality, production, customer service and safety whether that’s at work, at home or on the road.