The Law of Unintended Consequences and OHS Compliance

The introduction of OHS-related legislation can sometimes lead to an overreaction on the part of some organisations, which inadvertently results in unnecessarily complex or rigid procedures – potentially increasing risks rather than decreasing them.

If OHS-related legislation contains “scary” elements (such as industrial manslaughter), this is often an understandable flurry of activity to ensure that organisation are compliant and “protected” from the results of unforeseen events, said David Bentley, Leadership Specialist, Coach and Founder of consulting firm Just Leadership.

While the current model WHS laws are fairly “common sense friendly”, Bentley observed that there are more than a few historical examples of an overreaction to compliance fears and when the reaction is “too, well … reactive, it can result in a rush to introduce more complex or rigid procedures,” he said.

“This common approach says that ‘if we restrict the actions of the workers by adding more steps, things won’t go wrong.’

“Unfortunately, this is where the ‘two-minute procedure that takes seven minutes to complete’ smacks head-on into the ‘real world’.”

The unintended consequence is that complexity often increases risk rather than decreasing it, said Bentley, who recently spoke at the Tasmanian Safety Symposium & Trade Show 2019.

In order to address and counter this tendency, Bentley said leaders need to understand first-hand the complexity of the environment in which work is done.

Viewed from the relative comfort of an office, a procedure may seem straightforward – but add frontline environmental, schedule, equipment, client or other pressures.

“Competing stressors build and something has to give, which is when a hard-pressed team trapped between a ‘rock and a hard place’ will often create a ‘workaround’ for an otherwise impossible situation,” he said.

The unintended consequence is that unvalidated procedures emerge that may increase risk, he observed.

“This is the ‘operational drift’ between ‘work as imagined (procedures) versus work as done (the real world) that HF and Safety II people speak about,” he said.

“Now having said that, there is often some brilliant creativity in workarounds, so what would happen if we flipped the process and involved the people actually doing the work, in designing or validating the process?”

The effective components of the workarounds would be incorporated and validated as innovations, unnecessary impedances (and cost) would be removed and the need to take shortcuts eliminated, Bentley observed.

“When we use the collective knowledge of all of our people (particularly frontline leaders and workers) and encourage feedback into the continuous improvement process, problems can be investigated, solutions found, incorporated and revalidated with remarkable effectiveness,” he said.

Bentley affirmed that it is important for OHS professionals to be present in organisations, but not as ‘an outsider’.

“As an OHS professional, if you spend as much time as possible in the field with the various parts of the organisation and get to know the environment, talk to the workers, and experience the conditions and competing pressures, people will come to know you as someone who wants to help rather than being the ‘audit and report’ person and they can help you predict where unintended consequences from compliance initiatives might cause problems,” he said.

“Trust is a must.”

“I remember many years ago, hearing someone asking: ‘Where is the safety department?’ and the leader answering ‘right here. It is all of us.’”

Article originally published by the Australian Institute of Health and Safety.