Episode 163: Perception of Risk

In this episode of the Leading and Learning Through Safety podcast, Dr. Mark French reflects on the nature of risk perception, safety, and willpower in both personal and professional settings. He recounts a personal incident where he injured himself with a chainsaw while cleaning his yard, emphasizing how easy it is to misjudge or downgrade risks during seemingly routine tasks. Despite his safety expertise, a lapse in focus and precaution led to an injury.

Dr. French explains that willpower and focus are finite resources. When individuals are continuously engaged in high-risk tasks, their focus tends to diminish once the perceived danger is lower. This can lead to mistakes, as in his case, where he thought the hazardous part of the task was over but ended up getting hurt during cleanup.

He explores how similar scenarios occur in workplace environments. Employees may maintain focus during high-risk activities but become complacent during lower-risk tasks. This is why it's crucial for leaders to implement layers of protection, such as engineering solutions, personal protective equipment (PPE), and administrative controls. He highlights the Swiss cheese model, which visualizes how multiple safety measures can prevent accidents, though each may have weaknesses.

Ultimately, the podcast advocates for taking small breaks to refocus and ensuring proper planning before moving to new tasks. Dr. French's personal story serves as a reminder that even safety professionals are not immune to lapses, reinforcing the importance of maintaining a vigilant approach to risk management.

Transcript

Unknown: 0:00

This week on the leading and learning through safety podcast, continuing the discussion about risk and how that can happen with just a simple slip of the mind. I'm living proof of that, and I want to talk more about that this week on the podcast. You mark, welcome to the leading and learning through safety podcast. Your host is Dr Mark French, Mark's passion is helping organizations motivate their teams. This podcast is focused on bringing out the best in leadership through creating strong values, learning opportunities, teamwork and safety. Nothing is more important than protecting your people. Safety creates an environment for empathy, innovation and empowerment. Together, we'll discover meaning and purpose through shaping our safety culture. Thanks for joining us this episode and now here is Dr Mark French. You Music. Welcome to the leading and learning through safety podcast. Or as someone suggested to me, I should change the title to the bleeding and learning through safety podcast after last week's story that I told that I want to continue talking about this week. It's amazing how something that can happen to you makes such a profound impact. I'm being sarcastic, because the difference between major surgery and minor surgery is that minor surgery happens to other people. Major surgery happens to you? It's all about perspective, right? But I appreciated the comment last week about it very punny and always, always love a good pun. So let's get started. Last week, I told the story about how I had made a mistake and was cleaning up the yard. Got done with all the work, burnt my leg on my chainsaw, and then when I pulled it back, cut my leg enough that I used some amazing zipper strip things. So again, steri strips work, but these work so much better. You can find them on a lot of different places, and they work great. But what it really showed is that every day we talk about risk in our workplace, as leaders and as safety people, we talk about risk. We want to help people understand how to avoid big and small, whatever it is some level of risk. There's some really great studies out there, even when we start with the American Psychological Association and just simple things about items like willpower, self control, that it's a limited resource. It is not something that you can infinitely pull on. And in the workplace, I think there's, there's an intent to say that, Oh yeah, for the eight hours that you're in that work position or doing that work, you should be focused. You should be engaged in the workplace. Every minute of that time that you're there, except for your breaks and lunches, you should be engaged. That's so much easier said than done and not really possible. And that's why there's layers of protection. That's why we, at first, we want to engineer it, eliminate it, substitute out the hazard, because we know if we only rely on Hey, just don't get hurt, be safe, don't put your hand there. That only can work for as long as there is the willpower to continue it. When thinking about willpower, when thinking about having to stay focused and continually perform that's difficult in even some simple settings, I think about sometimes, if I'm able to stay focused and on task for a 30 minute meeting, that is not requiring a lot of physicality, not requiring me to worry about life and death and safety and harm, when truly what I need to be doing is taking notes and focusing on a meeting. Do I lose focus there? Oh yeah, working in the yard was the perfect example of that, of where I knew what I needed to do. I. How to do it. I knew probably what I needed to wear to do it the absolute safest way. And instead, I got done with the major tasks and was doing the simple tasks that only should have been simple and easy to do. And yet, I pick up a chainsaw that's still hot, I touch it to my leg on accident, and I pull it away because Ouch, it's hot, and suddenly I have a cut, and not an insignificant cut. I'm looking at it right now of where it's healing and it's itching, and it could have been so much worse. And I think about the impact it had on my family. I think about the impact it had on my reputation. I think about the impact it had with my son watching me do it that way. And I think about the impact of telling the story now and sharing that story of how I made that mistake in consciously deciding that I was going to do that end clean up work in that manner, with more cooler clothes on so I could avoid some of the heat that was outside. I made a conscious choice to do it that way, and that choice led, ultimately to the injury. Now, fortunately, this was not again, a significant life changing event. There are significant life changing events that happen every day in workplaces around the world, and there are leaders who look at those people and go, well, they should have just done the right thing. They should have been safe. They shouldn't have done that. I told them to be safe, and that's the answer, and that doesn't work. And I am proof positive of how that doesn't work. There's some really interesting studies. When I was doing some research years ago on injuries and where they occur and perceptions of risk, I came across a whole body of literature that tested some similar impacts and people's opinions and their outcome of risk, like, what did they feel about the risk they were taking, and how did they downgraded? How did they become comfortable with it? And one of the interesting findings, it's not a surprising finding, but it's an interesting finding, is that in high hazard work, when the person was working on the items that were life and death, like super understandably high hazard, working on a roof, very high up, or working around dangerous materials, they were focused more than when they downgraded to maybe still dangerous work, but not as dangerous of work. We think about steel plants. I think about logging. I think about chemical industries, where there's some processes and procedures that you know have, except you're going to follow the very letter checkbox by checkbox, because the hazard is significant and you know it, and you completely understand that the risk could be high if it's not done the way it should be done. But then when you move to another task that still has risk, because it's still in that type of industry where there is risk that there is a significant drop in focus and willpower and personal just attention to it, because you've now got to let that rest. It's like using a muscle and you go, heavy lift, heavy lift. Doing lots of work. You need to rest afterward. Or you just get done sprinting, you've got to catch your breath. So there's a dip rather than a sustained process. It goes up and down. It has ups and downs. And when you're up, you're really focused, and when you're in those ups and downs are relative. I hope I'm kind of making sense here, that in a very easy place of work, the ups and downs are minor. They're the they're very narrow. And when in bigger industries that have more risk, like high risk industry, the ups and downs are big, like you can go from working on something that's very dangerous into the maybe the office environment of like a control room, and then you go back out into the field, where you go back to your control room. The dips are big. But what they found is the perception of that risk even extends further in those cases, that the higher the risk when you came off of that and you go back in, your downgraded risk is significantly more, because it's like a rest period for your mind. It's a rest period for the willpower. I felt that firsthand in a very real way two weeks ago. Let me talk more about this perception of risk coming up on the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast. You are listening to the leading and learning through safety podcast with Dr Mark French dsda Consulting. Learn you lead others. The Myers, Briggs Type Indicator is an amazing tool. Problem is that it can be easily misinterpreted. Dr Mark French is MBTI certified and ready to help you discover your inner strengths. The MBTI assessment can help with team building, stress management, communication, conflict management and so much more, individual and group sessions are available to help you discover what makes you great. For more information, visit us on the web at tsda consulting.com and welcome back to the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcasts. So again, a couple of weeks ago, doing some work outside, and I'm running a chainsaw. I am cutting down some larger ish brush and some smaller trees, cleaning up the yard, and then chopping those pieces up so I could actually haul them and into a pile that is hazardous work. There is no doubt that operating. There's nothing about a chainsaw that you look at and go, Oh, that's perfectly safe. Just go crazy with it. No, that's why it's the thing of horror films. It's the logging industry is very dangerous for a lot of reasons, not just the chainsaw part, but a chainsaw, inherently, when you look at that and you run one, you understand danger. Now there's still certain amount of training and reading and preparation that needs to be done to assure you use it the right way. And along with PPE, yes, there is that. And then what happened for me? I'm getting tired. I'm getting hot. It's getting later in the day. I'm thinking about lunch or dinner or whatever. I put it down. I'm done with the brush, cutting. The big risk, the significant risk, has ended for me, or so I think. And then I get ready for the cleanup phase, which includes me changing into some shorts and a T shirt to where I'm a little bit more comfortable out there working, because I'm already tired, I'm already hot, ready to take a break and but yet I really don't want to leave pieces of brush and stuff just laying in the yard. Got to put up my tools. Clean up after with a cleanup phase of any good home project, and that's when it happens. If I had been still wearing pants, wouldn't have burnt my leg, probably wouldn't have cut myself as bad either if the burn had actually been felt. I wasn't I was reckless. Very much so to let that piece of the motor in the chain be so close to an exposed piece of my body, I downgraded the risk. My willpower had exhausted. My focus on the safe practices were no longer there, and I ended up hurt, fortunately, again, not significant, but hurt. Let's think about our workplace, our organizational environment. This happens every day, willpower and focus and risk, and this is where it's important that we see this as leaders. We see the opportunity to correct it, to engineer it, to remove it, to substitute it, that we cannot just rely on someone changing the way they do the work, or just putting on PPE, is that a piece of the puzzle? Yeah, the Swiss cheese model, to me, is the most easily visual representation of that risk is you put so many every piece of risk reduction you put into place has some form of a hole in it, unless you completely eliminate it, and then you're not even worried about the Jesus anymore. But all the other phases have, whether small holes or big holes, or many holes, there's opportunity for the risk to reach the person. And the more pieces you put into place, you hope that they never align up and the risk reaches the person. In this case, with me, there was two pieces of that focus and PPE. I lost both in the workplace, the focus part, the administrative and PPE part, can align in various parts of the day, depending on so many factors. And one of those factors is, where is the what is my perception of the risk? Is it exceptionally high? Where I have the perception that's high? Okay, or is it something lower? And if those tasks, and of course, I'm getting very theoretical, because in practice, can we always plan to have, like a gradual up and down of risk and work maybe, maybe not. And so when we come off of one into something else, how much do we downgrade the perception of that risk? Because if I go from something extremely dangerous to something less dangerous, my perception is expanded. It is more i over exaggerate that perception of risk. Same thing would happen if someone was really mean? You go to one store and you're buying something and the clerk is just kind of rude, just I just not a very good person about being friendly. You go to the next store and they're not exceptionally friendly, but they're better than the person you just saw. Your perception most likely is something that that person was amazing, such a wonderful person. And it goes the opposite way too. If you meet, if you're eating at a restaurant and the server is just exceptional, you go to another restaurant and they're good, but they're not exceptional. You may walk quick. I know that just wasn't so good. It's perception. And we expand it, we exaggerate it. Human nature perfectly normal. We do the same thing with risk. And so my perception of the risk when I was fully done cleaning up the yard was way low. And we will see that happen in our workplace, that's where reminding people of the risk, putting systems in place, putting engineering practices in place, having good leadership of following up with, hey, maybe we take a little break here after the really hard thing, rather than jumping into the next less hard thing that still has some kind of significant risk to it. Maybe that's where we do take that five minutes, sit down, grab our breath, grab our focus back. Think about what we're about to be doing and go forward. You've heard the take five minutes. Take two minutes and think about the next task. In the long scope of things, it feels like a long time when you're doing it, but in the real scope of the work, it's not it's you take that moment to bring your focus back, let your Okay. We've done that. Let's now think about what happens next. How do we plan that? In that we put that planning phase like a JSA for the next task, reviewing where the risk is and what we're going to do to mitigate the risk. I'm proof positive right here. I am the proof sitting here right now that even someone exceptionally trained in safety can embarrassingly do something really silly. And did I mean to do it? Did I want to get hurt? Of course, not. No one wants that. And yet it happened, because it can happen, because we as individuals, we as human beings, are the most complex and most wonderful part of any work ecosystem, because we can problem solve, but we can also do some things that we're not so proud of afterward, and we learn from it, and we go forward from it, and we hope that we can not have so much harm that we can't learn from it. There's the important part making sure that we reduce that risk, we control that risk, so that we can be able to share the good and the bad with each other. Thanks for joining me on this episode of the bleeding and learning through safety podcast. And until next time we chat, stay safe. You. Music. Thank you for listening to the leading and learning through safety podcast. More content is available online at www dot tsda consulting.com all the opinions expressed on the podcast are solely attributed to the individual and not affiliated with any business entity. This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes. It is not a substitute for proper policy, appropriate training or legal advice you music. This has been the leading and learning through safety podcast.