Episode 215: Statistical Safety

In this episode of Leading and Learning Through Safety, Dr. Mark French explores how statistics and risk prioritization can help safety professionals focus limited resources on the hazards that matter most.

Using an example from his career in a chemical plant, Mark describes an unusual incident in which wind carried a small particle of dust around an employee’s safety glasses, ultimately resulting in prescription eye drops and an OSHA-recordable injury. While the incident deserved attention and an appropriate response, its low severity and low probability of recurrence contrasted sharply with the extensive investigation and corrective-action process that followed.

The experience highlights an important challenge in safety leadership: organizations have finite time, energy, and resources. When disproportionate attention is given to low-severity, low-probability events, safety teams may have less capacity to address hazards with genuine serious-injury-or-fatality potential, including hot work, lockout/tagout, confined-space entry, fall protection, and line-breaking activities.

Mark also emphasizes that root-cause analysis should be a learning tool, not a punishment. When investigations become exercises in blame, excessive documentation, or making people feel responsible for unpredictable events, organizations risk damaging both psychological safety and the effectiveness of the investigation process.

The goal is not to ignore minor incidents. Organizations should investigate, learn, implement reasonable improvements, and move forward. Effective safety leadership means maintaining perspective and using data to prioritize prevention efforts where they can have the greatest impact: protecting people from the hazards most capable of causing serious injury or death.

Transcript

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Mark French: 0:00

This week on the podcast, we're talking about the

most interesting topic ever: 0:03

statistics. Oh my gosh! I'll try to make it interesting this week on the podcast.

Unknown: 0:31

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.

Mark French: 1:29

Welcome to this episode of the Leading and Learning Through Safety podcast. Thank you so much for having me as part of your podcast rotation. Such an honor to be here, so I previewed the idea that we're going to talk about statistics. So if you're still hanging with me after that, I'm not really going to talk about deep dive statistics. One, I'm not even that good at it. Two, what the real focus is when we talk about statistics is how do we focus on what's most important? How do we guide ourselves to finding what is mission critical? What are the items that we should be focused on? And that's where some statistical certainty can be very helpful to understand if this is something that we really need to focus on. Now, let me back up. In the world of safety, do I believe that anyone should get hurt? No. No one should get hurt coming to work. No injury should happen because of a workplace thing. It should not happen. We should work really hard, and we do work really hard to prevent those things from happening. Now, take a step forward. We can't fix everything at once. We have to find ways of knowing where our energy, because our energy is a limited resource, our effort is a limited resource, our finances are a limited resource. We have all these limited resources. We can get it done, but we have to prioritize and we have to execute, and we can't be distracted by something that may consume too much time, rather than focusing on something that we should be working on, and I think the best example I can give of this is I'll tell a story, and this is where it all began. As I was randomly reminiscing about my history and safety, and I remembered one scenario that just it boggled my mind, and now I'm I'm as I was reminiscing for some random, I guess we'll call that a shower thought, my mind was racing, and that's where it ended. So years ago, working in an industry where we had multiple buildings, so it was chemical plant, multiple buildings. So when these campuses style usually are just filled with dirt and gravel. They're not 100% paved. There's usually places where there's gravel out. They're just dust. And one day, an employee was walking between buildings, and it was a a really it was kind of like a it was wide enough for a few trucks to pass through. But it was like a corridor almost of two buildings between each other. The wind blew just right that day, and it wasn't even really a windy day. It was just a breeze that came through. It had been dry. The dust picked up in a speck of dust, got around his safety glasses and into his eye. Went to the nurse, rinsed it. Things didn't go as well as we thought. Ended up needing a prescription eye drop for the irritation. Now, what does that do? That makes it an OSHA recordable. He was written a prescription, therefore it is an OSHA recordable. Is this a severe OSHA recordable? No. Did it have significant incident or fatality potential? No. What were the chances of the wind picking up at just the right time, at just the right effort to get around safety glasses to get into your eye and cause enough irritation that you need prescription eye drop? Very low. I'd never seen it before. Haven't seen it since. It's not probably a super common occurrence. Now, other people may have experienced differently. Would love to hear about your experiences with that. But because it was a recordable, I was put under full scrutiny of the corporate powers, which should have been just a simple, you know. We looked into it. We were wearing safety glasses. It was dry, so we have a water truck. We can run it more often during these dry days. That's a good lesson learned. We can wet things down. Really, there's not a lot of real root cause when we keep asking why, why, why, why was he walking? Well, there's a lot of things that really don't deliver down that path of what happened and how we can prevent it. Sometimes we statistically have to accept the fact that it happened, and that it's probably unlikely that it will ever result in something severe, and it's probably very unlikely that it will ever happen again. So the good news is, and again, I'm stepping back, and I want to make sure I'm very clear on this. No one should get hurt. I'm not happy that anyone gets hurt at work. Number one, though, if we can control severity if we can control the PCF potential because there's a lot of data out there that says that even though we're doing a lot of work in safety, the fatality rate isn't being affected like it should. We're not reducing it at the rates that that we see it should be happening. So there's a lot of data out there about that. Some really smart people are researching that and looking at that. It's a focus on severity. We've got to make sure severity is brought down low enough. So again, in this case, what are the chances that that ever becomes something super severe? What so low, so low? What are the chances of it ever happening again? So low, you wouldn't believe how many hours were invested from a safety team and others to investigate and mainly make a report, so that other people felt good that something was done. It was almost like, and I'll be honest. Sometimes the word "go do a root cause" is a punishment for making a mistake. I have seen that before. I have felt that before in automotive. It really was when we would have our suppliers send us something, and there was a defect. We would demand this super detailed root cause. It was a punishment. We knew they were going to fix it, but we wanted them to go through the exercise as almost like here. You're going to have to invest a lot of time and money now to do this work that doesn't really matter. So anyway, I'll step back. Root cause should never be a punishment. It should be a learning opportunity. And if it ever gets a negative connotation, you're in trouble. Now that's a separate conversation, but a powerful conversation of intentioned and unintentional consequences of something you're doing. Did you meet? Are are the intentions there, and what unintentional consequences can come from it? When you turn a root cause into a methodology of bringing people together to beat them up and to make them feel small and to make them feel not smart, then that is a bad example of leadership. That is taking a great tool and it's ruining it. It's breaking it. It is making it so that it feels like there's. It just makes it feel bad. I'll put it that way. So in this case, the example I'm giving that really started this entire thought process for me began with that work and me going, okay, absolutely, I don't want that to happen again to anybody. But what can we honestly do? Can I control the wind? No. Can I redesign the building so that the wind doesn't blow through there, even on a light breeze from the south southwest, maybe. But would I then have to consider all the different directions of the wind and where does the wind normally blow? For that's a path you take that really ends up in in a rabbit hole of nothingness. It doesn't get you anywhere. And so what we really came to was that. We got to make sure we're wearing our safety glasses. We need to be aware if it's a really even though this day wasn't, it was a breeze. If it's a really windy day, maybe consider in certain areas making sure we wear something better. Consider it to think about how that would reflect. But most importantly, when it's when it's dry, let's put more time behind the big watering truck. It has a-it's basically a big truck with a tank on the back and has sprayers, and they drive it around and it wets the ground, so you don't have dust. Let's invest more time in having that drive around on dry spells, and if it's windy or breezy, that's even a better opportunity for someone to be driving it around a lot more in those areas, that's something we can do. That's something tangible we can handle. Well, let's talk more about how that root cause went on the next half of the podcast.

Unknown: 10:53

Humanizing the workplace-it is the leading and learning through safety podcast. What drives next level performance in your business. It's not just strategy; it's your people. And great performance starts with great leadership. At TSDA Consulting, we believe real leadership begins by creating a workplace where people feel safe, supported, and heard. TSDA Consulting is led by Dr. Mark French, a recognized leader in their workplace culture who helps organizations bridge the gap between behavioral psychology and operational safety. Learn yourself, lead others, create safety. Visit tsdaconsulting.com today.

Mark French: 11:37

And we're back to the second half of the Leading and Learning Through Safety Podcast. So we're talking about root cause, and so when I look at that situation, and we did the root cause, and it was a group root cause, we followed a methodology. Really, it came down to: can we increase PPE? Can we be more aware of windy days? Can we run the can we run the truck more with water and keep things wet. So we then have to present that to the corporate group, and we get together. We present it, and it again. This became an opportunity for a good old-fashioned beat down to make people feel better, and that's what it turned into. Was how could you let this happen. This is this is unacceptable. You know we need to keep our OSHA rates low. How can we get an? How can you accept an OSHA recordable for eye drops? Okay. Well, that there's nothing I can do at this point. That's out of the box. It's done, and so we go further into the example of like, well, what kind of gravel are you using? What kind of soil content is in the area? Great question. Can I fix that? Not really. I'm probably not digging up the entire soil and replacing it with something better. I'm just guessing. There's not capital money for that. Didn't say that out loud. Now I'm thinking it, of course, because at the time I wanted to keep my job. Thought it. Didn't say. But the best one was that you know what do you do about the person in the cab of the truck driving the water around? Pardon me. I don't. I don't understand the question. Well, they're they're inside a truck. What if the air filtration system doesn't work, and the dust somehow gets into the cab of the truck and surrounds the person and gets in their eyes? Do you do you check the air filters and the cab air filter, and do you make sure the windows are rolled up, and do you make sure it has a windshield? Wow, huh? All right, yeah, I'll be more than happy to verify all the things with the truck to make sure that the dust particles do not attack while in the cab of the truck, perfect. And so we continued that conversation, and it only got worse of just making someone feel small, making the safety person feel bad that they didn't somehow control that situation fast enough, well enough, or predict it from happening so they could have prevented it. Now, let's look at the other items that are going on inside a chemical plant. You're worried about hot work. You're worried about line break. You're worried about lockout/tagout. You're worried about confined space entry. You're worried about fall protection in some cases of where you're at and you're working. You're worried about people working above and below. What could they drop? How could they drop it? There is a lot of concerns. A lot of concerns that have to be managed that have real SIF potential, that the work is going on every day, that they're doing that same work that could be highly dangerous every day, and the focus is to de-risk that work to be there and see it. But instead, I am being Completely, just decimated over not predicting a dust injury from wind, from a from a breeze, and it was unbelievable how much work went into presenting, taking the beating, and then following up with all the corrective actions I was assigned to validate the windshield, validate the air filters, validate the water, all these things. When the real risk was not being addressed, it was still being addressed, but too many hours were being allocated elsewhere. The focus was not in the right place, and because of that, here's where I go into the statistics of safety. Unfortunately, we do have to look at the data, and we have to focus on the things that are really going to make a difference in protecting lives and protecting people. If we can do something, we should do it. Now, with the dust injury, for example, I'm going to give the example of how this should have went. We should have looked into it. Absolutely, there's an injury. We should see if we can learn something from it. Statistically, this is minor. Statistically, this is probably something that it's not just ignored, but it's something that gets a lower priority, so we quickly root cause. We do a fast root cause. We see what we can learn. We apply the learning. Boom. We move forward and we start work, continuing our work, continuing our path on the stuff that's most important. But when we take that time to go find something minor to make a big deal out of. We get off the rails a little bit of what our real focus should be in safety. The real focus should be focused on those things that have real statistical impact, the items that we are facing every day that have high severity consequences. And again, I'm saying you ignore the rest, but the focus there has to be that path. Ultimately, that that value goal that says, "Yeah, that happened. We got to fix it, but never forget our real mission. Never forget the path that we're having to take. Never forget the path that we have to go through. And never forget that that is what we're trying to focus on. That we're trying to focus on the things that matter the most, the items that can get someone really hurt, the items that could get someone killed. How do we prevent those? Because if our focus is elsewhere, if we're being distracted, if we're being pushed off the rails, if we're afraid to get in there and ask the real questions that are going to push our our systems further and better, then we have to find a way to get back on track. We have to keep our culture strong that way. Of the focus is on the most important, the statistically significant items. It is not callous when someone says that was a statistically insignificant incident. Here's a fast root cause. Here's what we did, versus here's where the real potential is, and here's the things we're doing to prevent it. We look way too reactive, not enough proactive, when it comes to that looking down rather than looking at boots on the ground. How does it work? Thanks for joining me on this episode, and until next time we chat, stay safe.

Unknown: 19:06

Thank you for listening to the Leading and Learning Through Safety podcast. More content is available online at www.tsdaconsulting.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. This has been the lead. And learning through safety podcast.