Personally, I hope I never witness or investigate another accident. No one wants anyone, especially themselves, to get hurt. Your workforce will inevitably identify incidents that, in their eyes, were NOT preventable. Without identifying the root cause, nothing has really been fixed.Ĭredibility: All work involves at least some degree of risk and all work involving people is subject to inevitable human fallibility and error. Ignoring the role of interacting factors outside of the worker’s control (e.g., cultural, environmental, etc.) leads to simplistic corrective actions that fail to address root causes and typically results in needless recurrence. There is a deeper and more nuanced story to virtually every incident, going considerably beyond indicating “someone did something stupid.” This is especially true in serious incidents and fatalities. Missed learning opportunities: Conclusions grounded in hindsight bias are often the “obvious” answers and ignore the why of accident causation. Hindsight bias often concludes with, “They should have done this…,” placing the blame squarely on the workers shoulders while ignoring contextual problems. Prior to the accident the very same “careless” behavior was very frequently condoned or ignored. Even in the relatively effective organizations I’ve assessed over the years, most disciplinary actions were taken only after an accident. Managers and supervisors often reward employees for unsafe work habits (e.g., cutting corners to get the job done on time) only to punish them later when an accident occurs. Fear nullifies trust and engagement and has a toxic effect on continuous safety improvement.īlame: Nothing generates fear like blame – especially when the blame is perceived as unjustified. Even under the influence of good intentions, saying that all accidents are preventable is often perceived by workers as a warning that accidents are merely the result of careless workers failing to prevent them. This makes it easy to draw a straight cause and effect line to explain the incident (generally someone’s “fault”), ignoring the myriad of factors (from production pressure to the complexity of procedures) that commonly interact and increase a worker’s propensity to fail.įear: When you tell your workers that all accidents are preventable, you are in fact communicating that it is their fault if they experience one. Oversimplification: With hindsight bias you have access to information that is rarely available to those doing the work at the time of the incident. This is problematic for a variety of reasons. Since those of us in safety deal with incidents and near incidents on a routine basis we have more opportunities to succumb to hindsight bias than the general public. It positively reinforces us to believe in intelligence beyond our own reasonable capacity. Like other biases, we are all susceptible to hindsight bias. The APA Dictionary of Psychology defines hindsight bias as “the tendency, after an event has occurred, to overestimate the extent to which the outcome could have been foreseen.” Some refer to hindsight bias as the “I knew it all along” syndrome. The term hindsight bias refers to the tendency people have to view past events as more predictable (and thus preventable) than they really were. Before we get into specifics, however, we need to understand just what hindsight bias is and our own capacity for it. There are several problems with this kind of reasoning, and they all have to do with hindsight bias. It is so seductively easy, employing the clarity of hindsight bias, for those not involved in an incident to self-righteously proclaim it to have been “preventable.” Companies even use the clichéd “ALL accidents are preventable” as a motto. I hear them all the time after an incident and have probably even used one or more of them myself. “Why didn’t they just follow the procedures?”ĭo these statements sound familiar? They should. “Why didn’t they show more common sense?”
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